This paper aims to take place into the ongoing debate about the lack of digital editions of classical texts. If, on one hand, a "traditional" critical edition has the benefits of consistency and clarity, but it often lacks objectivity, a digital one can have more scientific ambitions of verifiability, but may have certain problems of methods and visualization. This paper offers thus a report on the preliminary stage of a native digital edition of Catullus which would take into account all the surviving witnesses, with particular focus on the complexity of the tradition and the practical and theoretical problems that an editor is forced to face while coding with TEI apparatus.