[ptrourke]

Originally Posted by cmumford

Yeah I was concerned about plays, and how to algorithmically differentiate them from text that should reflow. I looked at Dido Queene of Carthage and it has commas at the end of most of the lines. I'm sure that over the centuries there have been a ton of different styles used, and it's going to be quite a challenge to get this right.

Don't do it algorithmically, have a check mark for "Verse" (for poetry, and plays written in verse). Dido Queen of Carthage has very defined line endings (the lines are strongly end-stopped), thus the commas, but that's a peculiarity of Marlowe's early verse style, and not typical of other verse.

Originally Posted by cmumford

I noticed that at the beginning of each paragraph there are names like _Cloan._ and _Iar._. Do you know what these mean?

Those are speech assignments - they tell you who speaks the next lines. In the case of Dido, Iar. is Iarbos, who is in love with Dido, and Cloan. is Cloanthes. You can have speech assignments either before the first line of a speech, or at the beginning of that line. The cleanest typesetters tend to put the speech assignments in the margin to the left of the first line, but putting them before the first line with a dividing space before and after, like this:

HAMLET

To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or take arm against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing, end them.

Also be aware of stage directions, which should ideally be formatted differently (i.e., bracketed in square brackets, which is what I'd do with plain text, or italicized).

Someone asked about widowing: that's something that has to be done by the display device (i.e, the Sony Reader), not the book formatter, unless there's some kind of style information for each book that includes the option of turning on and off widow and orphan support (I haven't seen the BBeB format raw yet, so I don't know if the Sony Reader has such style information).