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Old 09-25-2012, 11:14 PM   #1
JoanneM
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JoanneM began at the beginning.
 
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Formatting poetry - non-standard indents

Hi all. I am using this for my non-indented lines to preserve hanging indents and spaces between stanzas:

div.poem { margin: 0 0 0 0; padding: 0;}
p.stanzafirstline {margin: 30px 0 0 0; padding: 0; text-align: left; text-indent:-30px;}
p.otherlines {margin: 0 0 0 0; padding: 0; text-align: left; text-indent:-30px;}

Obviously for a line which is normally indented, I just define the margin differently:

p.otherlines1tabindent {margin: 0 0 0 30px; padding: 0; text-align: left; text-indent:-30px;}

But I am trying to figure out how to handle poetic lines which start immediately below where the previous line ended, like so:


This is a first line
and this second line starts below it.


(Hopefully that shows up properly.)

I can think of some inelegant workarounds, eg. inserting non-breaking spaces at the beginning of the line or individually defining the margin of each of those lines, except that that only works if the reader uses the same font and font-size I am using, plus if the line is long enough to wrap around the screen, it'd look double-spaced and probably pretty weird.

Is there any way to define a margin conditionally, so it will look at the previous line for how much it should indent?
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