  A comprehensive formalism is developed to preserve the gauge invariance of
currents describing the photo- or electroproduction of mesons off the nucleon
when the final-state interactions of mesons and nucleons is taken into account
explicitly. Replacing exchange currents by auxiliary currents, it is found that
all contributions due to explicit final-state interactions are purely
transverse and do not contain a Kroll-Ruderman-type contact current. The
relation of the present formulation to tree-level-type prescriptions is shown.
