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Originally Posted by Ankh
With all due respect, Prestidigitweeze, a complex layout like that was, is, and likely will be destined to be a job for the master typesetter, and definitely not for "grunts" working under the insane deadlines, who are rarely paid to deliver the masterpiece.
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My point is that such layouts are really simply a matter of multiple indent levels.
I've laid out books requiring multiple indents in Word, various DTP apps over the decades, manual typewriters and even letter press. I've converted them into pdfs without issue. Trust me when I say I'm far from a master of formatting
or typesetting. Multiple indents are supposed to be easy.
If what I'm talking about were difficult to render in any but our current quirky formats (ePub, mobi, LRF, etc.), then verse in visual/prosodic stanza forms wouldn't have been as common as the nursery rhyme (nor included the nursery rhyme!) for the past eight hundred years.
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There is a (commercially) limited interest for these titles, hence limited demand for tools to automate/support such a job...
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With all due respect, I don't recall hearing there was a limited interest in the poetry of Poe, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dowson, Yeats, Valery, Thomas Hardy, Donne, Alabaster, Herbert, Keats, Bryon, Shelley, etc., etc. Their visual stanza forms are only compromised in eBook editions, never in printed form.
Here's something I've noticed on Mobile Read:-- Many of us seem to feel our own personal tastes are normative, and that a consensus on our favorite internet forums can answer any question re broad public opinion. If we don't care about an issue, we imagine that readers probably don't care anywhere else. We sometimes assume, for one thing, that narrative prose is the only writing that anyone could possibly be interested in reading. From this some of us might deduce that narrative prose is the only literature worth preserving, studying and popularizing.
But if you can't remember what pre-eBook poetry looked like in its original and intended form, then it's possible you haven't read poetry carefully enough.
Leaving aside the problems with forming conclusions about the popularity of a given work from the past eight centuries using only inductive reasoning and local consensus, perhaps it's meaningful to ask a different question:
Would the format of a collection of poems be important to you if you knew it was vastly important to the author -- that in fact what we're calling formatting is actually part of the structure of the poetry itself? Would you be persuaded to consider the idea if the poets I mean were not "of limited interest" but were in fact more famous and popular than any writer on Mobile Read dare hope to be?
How forbidding and limited in appeal do you think ordinary readers find Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wallace Stevens, W.S. Merwin (North America's poet laureate for ages), Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay? All of them would recognize their poetry in pdfs converted easily from Word. Not so the equivalent effort in ePub or mobi.
So far as I can tell, this seems a question of the limits of the formats and not the formatter.