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Old 03-21-2008, 11:10 PM   #16
RWood
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I'm a bit late to the discussion, but here are my two cents --

The publisher of the version you are transcribing or using as a reference altered the original work for financial reasons. They did not want to use a larger more expensive page size for the volume. For other reasons they did not use a smaller font size of a more condensed type. You have the ability to correct the prior changes. To preserve these errors is lunacy.

When I did the Harvard Classics series the two areas I dreaded most were verse and plays. These were posted in Sony LRF, MobiPocket PRC, and IMP formats (and a second version of IMP by Nick.) While all the words and marks are there, the visual structure is gone. The nature of the tools I used to create the final formats pushed all lines flush left and often deleted the spaces between related elements thus creating a solid mass. I do plan on going back and redoing all 50 volumes in the future as work and other commitments allow.
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Old 03-22-2008, 12:33 AM   #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce View Post
Dale,

I've been a web developer since the web's creation; I know CSS. Yes, CSS can supply the necessary formatting.

However, it's not I who want to "pretend" that line 6 and 7 are in fact a single metrical line. The poet quite definitely and intentionally wrote the poem that way, and it is far, far from uncommon. As I've labored to stress, what we could call "white space" is integral to many poems.

Many poems, if styled/formatted with CSS, wouldn't be able to use CSS classes at all, but would rather require line-by-line formatting.

As an extreme example, there is an entire class of poetry called "concrete poetry" that relies almost entirely on typography and white space management.

I didn't mean to start a flame war, only to caution would-be "e-poetry formatters" against casually altering the layout of a poem. Those line breaks mean something.

A few examples for those interested, in which jagged, irregular seeming spacing is intentional and in fact critical to understanding the poem:

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, Richard Wilbur
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth
Ode to the Confederate Dead, Allan Tate
Paterson, William Carlos Williams (in fact, most of WCW's work)


Code:
Her
     hips were narrow, her
                                     legs
thin and straight She stopped
me in my tracks - until I saw
her
      disappear in the crowd

Yes, I agree there are classes of poetry that do defy using any form of formatting. I think those are best like some mathematical equations you just create an image and go with it. However, I didn't believe that was what the original author was talking about however I have been wrong before.

By the way, there is always worst case items that defy description but if we only designed everything for the worst case then we couldn't do anything. I couldn't even make a eBook out of Alice in Wonderland since there is this tail (tale) in there that defies formatting. (I ended up with a <pre> on that one to make it work. I do not believe that poetry cannot be on an eBook device but I do think you have to be more creative than just saying it can't be done.

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Old 03-22-2008, 09:19 AM   #18
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe View Post
I couldn't even make a eBook out of Alice in Wonderland since there is this tail (tale) in there that defies formatting.
Interestingly, the Mobi creator web site uses "Alice" as its sample book in showing how to create an eBook. The "tail" is done beautifully using the Mobi-specific tag for indenting paragraphs, by having a gradually increasing, then decreasing indent for each line.
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Old 03-22-2008, 09:24 AM   #19
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I never said it can't be done. Yes, I realize I've taken this discussion outside the scope of what the OP intended. That's because I'm interested in learning how one would format such poems.

How far will CSS/HTML translate into other formats? If I'm setting type for a printed book, I pick the font and style. In a static HTML page, I could even get by with non-breaking space characters and not use CSS.

But what about devices that allow the user to pick different fonts? Even a font change could break the formatting of a poem.

If you formatted a poem (or any text) using advanced CSS techniques, such as putting each line in a div and using float and clear, or using so-called "sandbag divs" (technique illustrated here) what happens when that gets converted to an e-book format?

Last edited by Taylor514ce; 03-22-2008 at 09:29 AM.
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Old 03-22-2008, 10:44 AM   #20
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I suspect, Taylor, you just have to find out by experimentation what each device supports. The Gen3, for example, supports <DIV> but I don't know if it supports the "float" or "clear" atttributes on them. "Float" I strongly suspect it doesn't. It's obviously possible to achieve a lot more if you format for one specific device than if you try to make your formatting more general. Eg, Mobipocket books support a variety of Mobipocket-specific tags and attributes, which won't be understood by other devices.
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Old 03-22-2008, 11:33 AM   #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor514ce View Post
I never said it can't be done. Yes, I realize I've taken this discussion outside the scope of what the OP intended. That's because I'm interested in learning how one would format such poems.

How far will CSS/HTML translate into other formats? If I'm setting type for a printed book, I pick the font and style. In a static HTML page, I could even get by with non-breaking space characters and not use CSS.

But what about devices that allow the user to pick different fonts? Even a font change could break the formatting of a poem.

If you formatted a poem (or any text) using advanced CSS techniques, such as putting each line in a div and using float and clear, or using so-called "sandbag divs" (technique illustrated here) what happens when that gets converted to an e-book format?
Automatic translation of advanced formatting will almost certainly fail. You'd have to generate versions in each book format by hand.
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Old 04-03-2008, 06:31 AM   #22
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More on formatting poetry

I had already come up with a workable method of formatting the poetry in Forest Runes and posted the result to my web site. However, I wasn't completely satisfied. I thought that there must be a better way to do this. After doing some additional pondering and Googling, I see that quite a few people have wrestled with the problem of formattting poetry for the web.

In any event, I have what I think is a slightly better variation on the method that I had already used. I would like to get some comments and suggestions on possible improvements. What I don't want to do is to use numerous nbsp tags for indents. Note that any suggestions have to allow for multiple levels of indent to be applied to individual lines of a stanza. Also, the less markup needed, the better.

Here is my current example.

Code:
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Poetry Test</title>

        <style type="text/css">
            .indent1 { padding-left: 1.2em; }
            .indent2 { padding-left: 6.0em; }
            body { font-family: Georgia, serif; }
            div.poem { white-space: nowrap; }
            h1 { margin-top: 0.4em; text-align: center; font-size: 1.2em; }
            p {text-indent: 1.2em; }
            p.poem { text-indent: 0; }
        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <h1>SUNRISE IN THE FOREST</h1>

        <div class="poem">
            <p class="poem">THE zephyrs of morning are stirring the larches,
                <br /><span class="indent1"></span>And, lazily lifting, the mist rolls away.
                <br />A paean of praise thro’ the dim forest arches
                <br /><span class="indent1"></span>Is ringing, to welcome the advent of day.
                <br /><span class="indent2"></span>Is loftily ringing,
                <br /><span class="indent2"></span>Exultingly ringing,
                <br />From the height where a little brown songster is clinging,
                <br /><span class="indent1"></span>The top of a hemlock, the uttermost spray.
            </p>
        </div>
     </body>
</html>
A few notes:
  • I didn't know about "whitespace: nowrap" before. This takes care of preventing a long line from breaking.
  • Placing the closing span tag immediately after the opening span, or at the end of the line doesn't seem to make any difference. Placing it where I did simplifies the markup process, however. (I know, one is an emply span with a padding, followed by the text and the other is a span with padding that encloses the text. It still doesn't seem to display any differently).
  • Each stanza of a poem would be a separate paragraph of class "poem".
This seems to work fine in IE, Firefox and Opera. One problem with this method is that Mobipocket does not seem to support this. Using margin-left in place of padding-left doesn't work with Mobipocket either. A zillion nbsp tags will work, but I'm not willing to mark things up that way. Not only is is a PITA to markup, but it is a very ugly solution IMO.

Question: Is it OK to use "poem" as a class selector for two different tags that have different properties, as I did? It seems to work without any problems.

Last edited by jgray; 04-03-2008 at 06:40 AM.
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Old 04-03-2008, 09:29 AM   #23
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Yes, it's ok to use "poem" as a class selector for different tags. Indeed, that's the beauty of a class selector and even CSS... styles "cascade" downward.

What I don't care for are the empty spans. It seems the lines of your stanza should be within the span tags. You're rightly using what is called "semantic" markup. An empty span has no syntax.

Then too, some of your lines aren't enclosed in spans, which again alters the semantics of those lines. I think a more "proper" HTML would be:

Code:
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Poetry Test</title>

        <style type="text/css">
            .indent1 { padding-left: 1.2em; }
            .indent2 { padding-left: 6.0em; }
            body { font-family: Georgia, serif; }
            div.poem { white-space: nowrap; }
            h1 { margin-top: 0.4em; text-align: center; font-size: 1.2em; }
            p {text-indent: 1.2em; }
            p.poem { text-indent: 0; }
        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <h1>SUNRISE IN THE FOREST</h1>

        <div class="poem">
            <p class="poem"><span>THE zephyrs of morning are stirring the larches,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">And, lazily lifting, the mist rolls away.</span>
                <br /><span>A paean of praise thro’ the dim forest arches</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">Is ringing, to welcome the advent of day.</span>
                <br /><span class="indent2">Is loftily ringing,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent2">Exultingly ringing,</span>
                <br />From the height where a little brown songster is clinging,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">The top of a hemlock, the uttermost spray.</span>
            </p>
        </div>
     </body>
</html>
In fact, since "poem" will cascade down from the div to the paragraph, I think you could simplify this even further to:

Code:
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Poetry Test</title>

        <style type="text/css">
            .indent1 { padding-left: 1.2em; }
            .indent2 { padding-left: 6.0em; }
            body { font-family: Georgia, serif; }
            .poem { white-space: nowrap; }
            h1 { margin-top: 0.4em; text-align: center; font-size: 1.2em; }
            p { text-indent: 0; }
        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <h1>SUNRISE IN THE FOREST</h1>

        <div class="poem">
            <p><span>THE zephyrs of morning are stirring the larches,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">And, lazily lifting, the mist rolls away.</span>
                <br /><span>A paean of praise thro’ the dim forest arches</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">Is ringing, to welcome the advent of day.</span>
                <br /><span class="indent2">Is loftily ringing,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent2">Exultingly ringing,</span>
                <br />From the height where a little brown songster is clinging,</span>
                <br /><span class="indent1">The top of a hemlock, the uttermost spray.</span>
            </p>
        </div>
     </body>
</html>
I appreciate your diligence in pursuing poetry formatting. Thank you.

Last edited by Taylor514ce; 04-03-2008 at 09:52 AM. Reason: fixed typos
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Old 04-03-2008, 02:01 PM   #24
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Taylor514ce, thanks for the feedback. As I said in my post of the example, the reason I did the empty spans is that it is easier to markup, instead of wrapping the lines in the span. It also has the advantage of being easier to search on this as a unit, if I want to replace it with something else when building a different ebook that doesn't support this method.

Playing devil's advocate, why is an emply span semantically wrong? The span isn't really empty, it contains the padding for the indent. As for wrapping the non-indented lines in a span, I don't understand the need for that. It seems to be unnecessary markup.

In your second example, you tried to simplify the CSS, which I appreciate. However, I didn't want to combine things and apply a zero text-indent on the regular paragraph tag. I will want to have prose paragraphs with indentation.

Again, comments welcome. I'm just trying to figure out how to do this the "proper" way. However, I don't mind being a little "wrong", if it makes the markup easier to apply.
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