Typesetting Shakespeare

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

As far as the spacing for those lines - yes, you COULD use nbsp, but you really can't control the size of the reader's display...those spaces could cause the words to flow to the next line anyway. This is a long standing problem with things like plays and poetry.

I personally don't see any added benefit to having those spaces...just align them to the left like the other lines.

You would lose a lot if you didn't indent split lines. Remember that this is poetry, not prose. You really do need to show that you're continuing a line, not beginning a new one.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You would lose a lot if you didn't indent split lines. Remember that this is poetry, not prose. You really do need to show that you're continuing a line, not beginning a new one.

Thanks, Harry, I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way!

I'm still thinking that the nbsp way that I first suggested would be the best way to go -- no offense to Turtle for all his efforts, I do genuinely appreciate that, and those were some intriguing ideas, too.

Perusing some of the other Shakespeare plays, from what I've seen it would appear that none of the creators of them have made any effort to do that, i.e. "indent split lines" (as you accurately described it better than I did). I'm surprised about that, that nobody else ever bothered to at least do even a lousy job of it -- ha ha.

This reminds me of the multi-volume series of the writings of Henry David Thoreau that I did, which I initially began just to do his Walden, because there didn't seem to be a single nicely-formatted free version of that book available anywhere. In that book, there's quite a few tables, and it was shocking to see that nobody had ever bothered to get those looking nicely -- in every single other free version out there, they're an utter, complete disaster, virtually incomprehensible.

I guess that's somewhat similar to what I'd like to do with one, maybe three, Shakespeare plays -- just do a nice edition of them, one that's worthy of a writer of his stature, something that's enjoyable to read for the typography of it, and not only the beauty of its words.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Thanks, Harry, I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way!

I'm still thinking that the nbsp way that I first suggested would be the best way to go -- no offense to Turtle for all his efforts, I do genuinely appreciate that, and those were some intriguing ideas, too.

Perusing some of the other Shakespeare plays, from what I've seen it would appear that none of the creators of them have made any effort to do that, i.e. "indent split lines" (as you accurately described it better than I did). I'm surprised about that, that nobody else ever bothered to at least do even a lousy job of it -- ha ha.
<SNIP>

I guess that's somewhat similar to what I'd like to do with one, maybe three, Shakespeare plays -- just do a nice edition of them, one that's worthy of a writer of his stature, something that's enjoyable to read for the typography of it, and not only the beauty of its words.

We had a client that had done his screenplay in FinalDraft. (FWIW: from that day forward, I've never been willing to take another FD client.)

FD, in its infinite wisdom, has "shared dialogue" like this in columns, essentially, in the middle of the page. Worse, the client had to have the text offset 5 spaces from the left edge (margin, kinda) of the speaker's name. Right, with me so far? Top line (row) would be the two speakers; beneath, next row, would be their respective dialogue lines, and not ONLY did the first line of dialogue have to be indented 5 spaces (eh...) from the left-most-edge of the character's name, but then the line-wrapped stuff had to indent, AGAIN (a hanging indent), from the first line/row. Two levels of indent, beneath the two "pillars/columns" that were the Character names.

We ended up doing it ALL--all the shared dialogue--in tables. There simply wasn't ANY other way, that we found (bear in mind, kiddles, not only was this 4-5 years ago, but we had to do them for MOBI, too) that remotely worked.

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.)

IIRC, we put the speaker and dialogue in different rows; we used margins and padding for the cells, ALONG with hanging indents (negative indents) for the wrapped dialogue lines.

I'd never be willing to undertake it again, because it was a giant PITA and so was the client. Not without 5x the money, anyhow. I realize that's irrelevant to this discussion, but it seriously left me with a bad taste for anything remotely approaching it.

Spoiler:

The "play" was one of those creepy things where someone tried to capitalize on the death of a well-known individual, just because he and his wife HAPPENED to be in the same place as the famous person was at the time of his/her death. The whole thing was pitched as some "secret mystery of..." claptrap. Utterly repugnant. I was always amazed that he never realized that his "characters" were repulsive, repellant, graspy people. GOSH, what a surprise that it didn't zoom to the top of the Bestseller lists!

I've performed Shakespeare, and to the best of my recollection, no play reproduction I've seen used the shared-line mechanism. Granted, it's been <mumble> years, which puts it shortly after the end of the US Civil War, when I did that, but...still. I can recall no copy I've seen that reproduced it that faithfully.

I have to say,@Turtle, I don't think I recall text-transform working in everything???

Anyway: tables work, if that helps. As well as anything else.

Hitch

[Psymon]

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.)

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.

[Jellby]

You may try using "visibility: hidden", to add space that matches exactly some text, although there's no guarantee it will work (but I think it does with ADE). I used that in some of the initial poems of Don Quijote, I believe.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

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.

<SNIP>

Just a thought/idea -- however useful or useless.

Well, wide margins won't be very useful (effective) in small devices. That's the entirety of my $.02. Fortunately, you're in a position to please yourself.


Hitch

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

You may try using "visibility: hidden", to add space that matches exactly some text, although there's no guarantee it will work (but I think it does with ADE). I used that in some of the initial poems of Don Quijote, I believe.

Oh, indeed, that's an interesting thought. I'm basically just designing these "for myself" (in a way), basically just for fun, and was only planning on putting them up on the iBooks Store to give away for free -- and so if that worked out for me on my ol' iPad2, then I gather I'd be all set to go, eh? There's no concerns about it working on my old iPad, but having issues on other IOS devices, is there?

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, wide margins won't be very useful (effective) in small devices. That's the entirety of my $.02. Fortunately, you're in a position to please yourself.

Well, by "wide margins" I just meant allowing the margins to be as wide as they can be -- not any particular length of "wideness" -- and not taking up extra space with the speaker's (character's) name, or with line numbering or anything, so that hopefully each line of speech in the Shakespeare plays wouldn't wrap.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Oh, indeed, that's an interesting thought. I'm basically just designing these "for myself" (in a way), basically just for fun, and was only planning on putting them up on the iBooks Store to give away for free -- and so if that worked out for me on my ol' iPad2, then I gather I'd be all set to go, eh? There's no concerns about it working on my old iPad, but having issues on other IOS devices, is there?

Well, by "wide margins" I just meant allowing the margins to be as wide as they can be -- not any particular length of "wideness" -- and not taking up extra space with the speaker's (character's) name, or with line numbering or anything, so that hopefully each line of speech in the Shakespeare plays wouldn't wrap.

Yes, sorry, was still thinking about wide margins and nbsp's. Still---gonna wrap. I don't see how that won't happen, unless each additional line of dialogue segment is a single word or two. BUT, I'm sure we'll all see what happens as you go.

Hitch

[Psymon]

Oh, irony of ironies! Gee, I feel like I should have a better Shakespearean way of saying that.

So when I first posted my query here, in particular about that whole line indenting issue, I had yet to get started on working on any of the plays, I was just planning for "what was to come," based on my recollections of having read them. I hadn't quite decided at that time yet, either, whether to use the original spellings, etc. of the First Folio, or go with a more modernized version. In the end, though, after reading up a bit about it here and there in various articles on the 'net, I opted to go with the original spellings -- partially for authenticity's sake, as well as because I do have a personal affection for "ye olde Englishe bookes" and antiquarian books in general, and thought that would be both fun to work on, as well as to read (for me, at least).

Well! Wouldn't ya know it, once I got working on it -- comparing the digitized text I'd found of the First Folio edition wit high-resolution scans of the same (all freely available on the 'net) -- I discovered that in that first, original edition none of the lines were indented anyway!

Go figure. So in that sense my initial query here was moot -- although hopefully it hasn't been for nought, of course, and it's still been interesting to explore these issues, even if we never really did come to any particularly "definitive" solution(s).

And there's certainly been some nifty ideas brought up that might well come in very handy in some other context in the future, and so for that I do want to express my great appreciation to you all for your help!

Thanks so much, everybody!

[HarryT]

I have a facsimile edition of the First Folio, and it's a nightmare to read compared to a modern edition such as Arden, which uses modern spelling and punctuation, and indents split lines. If you want a version of the plays to actually read, I'd go with the latter.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I have a facsimile edition of the First Folio, and it's a nightmare to read compared to a modern edition such as Arden, which uses modern spelling and punctuation, and indents split lines. If you want a version of the plays to actually read, I'd go with the latter.

But what's a nightmare for you is exactly the thing that appeals to me! I love reading "ye olde bookes," with the early typographic styles (long esses, u/v placement, fancy-schmancy ligatures, etc.). I'm quite aware that what I"m doing will have a very limited audience and appeal -- but then, I am going to only be publishing it on the iBooks Store, so there's a pretty good chance that practically nobody will ever see it anyway.

[HarryT]

Fair enough. Your choice, of course!