The Text Alignment Network (TAN) is a suite of XML encoding formats intended to serve anyone who wishes to encode, exchange, and study translations, paraphrases, adaptations, quotations, and other varieties of text reuse. This article briefly introduces TAN, and in the spirit of the special issue of this journal focuses on the syntax of its intertextual pointers, which are styled to be both human-readable and -interoperable. Because TAN is at present an experimental format, this report notes progress, promise, and future prospects.