[Psymon]

Okay! To heck with the stupid graphical ornament for the breaks in the poems. It's really weird that I was able to get the ornament in the section breaks in the main text to center vertically okay, but not in the poems, but at this point I give up, and decided to go with what one of the print editions of this book uses, which is a row of three asterisks. This looked nice, and served the purpose, but naturally one might think that there would still be the issue of the top/bottom margins of that row of asterisks not looking equal, because asterisks are inherently "superscript"-like characters, of course.

So all I did was make them subscript asterisks (and adjusted my CSS for <sub> accordingly!

I know y'all will say that this is pretty wonky, but it WORKS! Looks virtually perfect in ADE, Sony Reader Library and on the iPad in iBooks. Here's the code that I ended up using in my HTML for that row of asterisks...

<p class="poem">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<sub>*</sub>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<sub>*</sub>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<sub>*</sub></p>

The "poem" class for the paragraph is the same as what I used for the rest of the poem lines, of course (each line is a separate paragraph -- my font size for that/those is 76%). And here's the CSS that I used for <sub> (it's the only place I used subscript at all in the entire book, so I can get away with this)...

sub {
    font-size: 100%;
	line-height: 100%;
	vertical-align : -38%;
}

I'll attach a screenshot of how it looks in iBooks (I did it portrait because in the two places in the book I needed this, in landscape both places inadvertently come at a page break, so you don't see the equidistant top/bottom margins). As I said, it would appear -- literally! -- to come out pretty much perfectly in everything I've tested it on, so I'm happy now!

Anybody see any issues with doing it this way (as wonky as it is)?