Help Required with poetry ebook conversions

[Adele Ward]

I'm converting poetry for Kindle and will want to do it for Epub too. The problem is when lines are too long and roll over on to a second line. I need the line to indent slightly if it rolls over onto a second line, but the default is for lines to indent after a line break and then left justify if the line rolls over. This works well for prose for new paragraphs, but with poetry the opposite needs to happen. Could somebody tell me how to make lines of poetry all left justify, but indent slightly if a line is too long and rolls over, or if the reader increases the font size and makes lines roll over?

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by Adele Ward

I'm converting poetry for Kindle and will want to do it for Epub too. The problem is when lines are too long and roll over on to a second line. I need the line to indent slightly if it rolls over onto a second line, but the default is for lines to indent after a line break and then left justify if the line rolls over. This works well for prose for new paragraphs, but with poetry the opposite needs to happen. Could somebody tell me how to make lines of poetry all left justify, but indent slightly if a line is too long and rolls over, or if the reader increases the font size and makes lines roll over?

I've no idea how to do this, I'm afraid, but will be following this thread to see if someone else knows.

All I do is to left justify the text, set the indent to zero, and let it break where it breaks. The authors I work for have accepted that, but they don't know any better.

[Sunlite]

You need a negative indent for your paragraphs. This means you set the left margin of the paragraph to the point where you want the second and following lines and set the text-indent to a negative value.

The CSS looks like this:

.poem{ text-indent: -2em; margin-left: 2em}

This works in ADE epub, but I don't know if it works in epub for iPad or if it translates correctly into mobi.

[kennyc]

<snarkyremark>Write shorter lines</snarkyremark>

[Adele Ward]

Thank you, this is all incredibly helpful. It's the last think I need for good poetry conversions.

Kenny, you might think it's a snarky remark, but I do believe ereaders are changing the way we write. Authors already write prose with shorter paragraphs because they work better on a small screen.

Sometimes I turn the screen to landscape rather than portrait, so ereaders actually let us use longer lines too. But poetry readers like to see the whole poem lengthwise too....

This has solved my problem and thanks everyone.

[Adele Ward]

For a perfect poetry ebook some editors actually put a code between every word to set the acceptable places for line breaks. This is incredibly time consuming but the sort of thing a poetry editor would do! And they ask why ebooks need to be priced like print books seeing as they're so 'easy' to produce....

[Persius]

Originally Posted by Sunlite

You need a negative indent for your paragraphs. This means you set the left margin of the paragraph to the point where you want the second and following lines and set the text-indent to a negative value.

The CSS looks like this:

.poem{ text-indent: -2em; margin-left: 2em}

This works in ADE epub, but I don't know if it works in epub for iPad or if it translates correctly into mobi.

Hi Sunlite

thanks for that, I work with Adele and am responsible for doing the conversions.

We follow the advice offered by amazon and the guidance frmo MS over how to go about these conversions.

basically its a word document saved as a filtered webpage which is then converted by mobi into another document format which is then uploaded into amazon which (apparently) undertakes further conversions and the book then comes out the other end as a Kindle book.

I'm not clear at what stage this code you suggest should be added to the document or by what means.