Hanging indents in HTML2LRF or Book Designer?

[LaughingVulcan]

I'm trying to format "Leaves of Grass," and it's my first experience with Poetry.

I've got the file basically finished, but I'm trying to figure out how to get a hanging indentation, so that when the text rolls into a next line, it's the second (and any further) lines that are indented. (Basically, it's a hanging indent.)

I can't figure out how to get either Book Designer or HTML2LRF to recognize it.... does anybody know a quick way to make this happen?

[HarryT]

I haven't tried it, but in BD I'd imagine that you should be able to do it by using, say, the "Verse" style for your poetry, and then on the "Styles" page of the "Make Sony Reader" dialog setting a negative value for the "Indent" field and a positive one for the "Shift" field for that style.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I haven't tried it, but in BD I'd imagine that you should be able to do it by using, say, the "Verse" style for your poetry, and then on the "Styles" page of the "Make Sony Reader" dialog setting a negative value for the "Indent" field and a positive one for the "Shift" field for that style.

Just tried it. Didn't work. Just got a block of text pushed over. No hanging indent. It converted the negative number back to 0.

[HarryT]

Oh well, it was worth a try. Sorry about that!

You could use two different styles for your text - one for the first line, and one for the rest of the lines. Have a larger "Shift" value for the second style than the first. That would certainly work.

[LaughingVulcan]

^ I'm not sure that would work, since what I'm looking to do is indent words that scroll past one line. For example:

("fakey" margins of reader below)

*---*---*---*---*---*---*
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

I would want to have become:

*---*---*---*---*---*---*
The quick brown fox jumps 
      over the lazy dog.

I can achieve this by manually going through the text and chopping it off (which I did to remove all the Project Gutenberg self-imposed line breaks... *ugh* and I wouldn't look forward to doing that again....)
But then when I bump it up to Medium size, I've got the problem back even worse. And I do like using the size, as I usually set Standard to 9 point and then usually read on Medium.

I cheated just a little when it looked like I wouldn't be able to get Book Designer to do it, and copied the BD html to another file, renamed it html, and then tried manipulating that in OpenOffice and WordPad. (I tried opening it in Word, only to get an annoying error message.) Anyhoo, I tried doing a find-and-replace for "align=justify" and adding in margin and negative para indents there. No dice when I ran that through HTML2LRF (though I did leave the "justify" in and maybe that screwed it up.) - It generated fine, just without indent or hanging indent.

Of course, the alternative is to simply ignore the problem - it looked just fine using Book Designer except for the line wrap "problem" which I find very distracting for poetry reading.


Anyway, thanks for the help so far! Any other suggestions?

[JSWolf]

LaughingVulcan, I mentioned the issue with hanging indents in the thread about html2lrf. Please take this over there so this can at least be sorted with html2lrf.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10582

[LaughingVulcan]

Continuing the saga, since it looks like HTML2LRF can't do it, either...

I managed to C/P the text from HTML to ODT (don't ask me why, but Open Office wouldn't resave it into anything but an HTML format...) Then resaved it as a Word .doc.

Word let me set the hanging indent very nicely.... I imported the doc file into Connect and loaded onto the Reader.

It works, but... In the doc format I can't get a title or author to display, and the fonts are all too small, comparitively.... Plus it imported the colors to the subtitling (remember, this is all a mangle of the BD file,) and rendered the turquoise in a very unattrative greyscale.

I think I'll figure out where to set the right margin in Word so that it renders the hanging indents to the screen resolution, then do a S&R on the soft returns, translating them to hard returns. Then a re-import to BD for final generation, but it will only render right at one screen size.

*whew*

[Patricia]

Laughing Vulcan,
do let me/us know if you succeed in getting the hanging indents. I would love to do some poetry with indented lines. I set them up in BD but they don't display on the actual reader.

[kovidgoyal]

html2lrf now supports hanging indents. See the demo in the html2lrf thread.

[Patricia]

I may have devised a makeshift solution for this, using BD.
See my upload of T S Eliot's 'The Waste Land', to see whether the solution works for you.

[LaughingVulcan]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

html2lrf now supports hanging indents. See the demo in the html2lrf thread.

Boy, does it work!!! Thank you, Kovid!!

The Sony Classics version, which I just spent a classics credit on last night, is just plain word wrapped. Ugly, IMHO....

Now, here's two pages from the version that I just generated using HTML2LRF:

The key to it is saving the document as html, then including a negative text-indent value in the paragraph style, then generating it in HTML2LRF.

	<STYLE>
	<!--
		P { font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; text-indent:-30px;	padding-left:30px; color: #000000 }
		H2 { font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"; color: #000000 }
	-->
	</STYLE>

It works very nicely indeed. Any errors in my file are my formatting mistakes AFAIK.

OK, off to upload some Leaves of Grass action!