Hi Christian, thank you very much! So I had overlooked the option -w, which enables the preservation of whitespace-only text nodes. For practical purposes, I can now achieve what I need - an exact copy of a source fragment: using "-w -s indent=no". Only one issue remains: the indentation does not honour "xml:space='preserve'". Example: Input: <a xml:space="preserve"><b/></a> Call: basex -i input.xml -s indent=yes -q. Result: <a xml:space="preserve"> <b/> </a> Cordial greetings, Hans-Juergen ________________________________ Von: Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> An: Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> CC: BaseX <basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de> Gesendet: 15:50 Mittwoch, 21.November 2012 Betreff: Re: [basex-talk] indent parameter Hi Hans-Jürgen, you may need to set the CHOP Option to false before creating a database or document [1]. Do you think this solves the problems? If no, do you have a small example that demonstrates the confusion? Christian [1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Startup_Options ___________________________