Trained to make mathematical models of the economy, Diederik Gerth van Wijk has devoted his professional life to modelling text. Since 1992 he is responsible for developing the DTDs used at Kluwer in Deventer, the Netherlands, the leading Dutch legal publisher. He is editor and frequent contributor of <!Element, the quarterly newspaper of the SGML XML Users Group Holland, and chairs the Dutch National Standardization Committee 381 034 that is the counterpart of JTC1 SC 34 (SGML, Topic Maps etc.).