Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
If you try to use NBSPs for that much indentation, your stuff will go right off the edge of the screen, in smaller devices. That's what we saw, anyway. If it doesn't--if that breaks--it will break in wholly unpredictable spots. (Somewhat reminiscent of using PRE or CODE to put around code samples, something I was looking at just yesterday...watch those just run right off the edge of the screen.)
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Well, as far as the text running off the screen because of using nbsps to do the indenting, that's why I said earlier I would alternate the non-breaking spaces with regular, "breakable" ones -- then the line
could wrap over to the next line if it had to.
Of course, I do realize that then that indented line would look screwy, BUT... this brings me back to the point that I mentioned before. I would
think that anyone reading Shakespeare would prefer to have lines not wrapping in the first place, that it would just be nice to read it "line-by-line" as one would see in a print version -- and, thus, if they were reading it on a smaller device (smartphone) they would probably just orient it to landscape.
Of course, one can't predict what people might do, but I guess that's just what I would
think they would do -- that's what I would do, anyway, if I was reading Shakespeare or any other poetry.
Also, the line lengths of Shakespeare aren't generally
too long, really, but nevertheless I was thinking that the best way to design it would be to make every effort to keep all those lines from breaking, basically by keeping my margins as wide as possible.
For one thing, I guess I would forego on Doitsu's nifty method of line numbering -- I
do think that's pretty cool! Obviously, though, that's taking up real-estate. :/
Another thing that I could do would be that instead of formatting my lines like this...
HAMLET: To be, or not to be...
...I could do everything up like this...
HAMLET
To be, or not to be...
That leaves the entire margin width available for each line of "speech."
And as another alternative to using nbsps (alternating with regular spaces), one could also come up with a reasonable facsimile of the desired effect simply with using centered and/or right-alignment.
Thus, to use that problematic bit from the example of Shakespeare that started all this, i.e....
CURIO: Will you go hunt, my lord?
ORSINO: What, Curio?
CURIO: The hart.
...by combining what I've been saying here, above, I could end up with this...
CURIO
Will you go hunt, my lord?
ORSINO
What, Curio?
CURIO
The hart.
I'm not entirely crazy about that method either, actually -- it would space things out
too much if one's display is too "widescreen" (for whatever reason), just as it's too much here in this thread (looking at it on my desktop PC) -- but I guess I thought I'd throw that out there as an alternative method, anyway. I'm sure that it would probably look pretty good on a smaller device, or in a two-page spread on an iPad or something, though.
Just a thought/idea -- however useful or useless.
