Poetry is tricky

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

widows and orphans can be used to aid in obtaining good page breaks.

Not in poetry, usually. Widows and orphans can control pagebreaks in a paragraph, but not between paragraphs (or block elements in general). And since poetry is best formatted as separate block elements for each line, widows and orphans have no control there.

What could be done is using "page-break-after:avoid" (or "page-break-before:avoid") in the first or first few (or last or last few) lines of each stanza, depending on the structure of each poem.

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

I wanted to point you to something done by Jellby too, but it seems he has never uploaded any poetry here

But I have:

Fables of Samaniego (in Spanish)
Fables of Iriarte (in Spanish)
La divina commedia (in Italian, English, German, Portuguese, Russian)

and there are poetry fragments in some other works like Carroll's books.

[doubleshuffle]

I'm so sorry; didn't look thouroughly enough it seems...

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Not in poetry, usually. Widows and orphans can control pagebreaks in a paragraph, but not between paragraphs (or block elements in general). And since poetry is best formatted as separate block elements for each line, widows and orphans have no control there.

What could be done is using "page-break-after:avoid" (or "page-break-before:avoid") in the first or first few (or last or last few) lines of each stanza, depending on the structure of each poem.

Yes, you are right but I sometimes use <br> within a stanza depending on how complicated the poetry is and how long the lines are. I have not published a book with only poetry just poetry within a another genre. Controlling with page breaks can work and div can be used to group stanzas or portions of stanzas.

Dale

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by canpolat

I, as the "publisher" can actually settle for that. And I suppose some of the readers will also accept it. But then there is the poets who want their poems to display just as they intend them to appear. I can understand them since poetry is -at times- visual as well (Visual Poetry, Wikipedia).

That doesn't mean I will give up

That's easy-peasy. Then they can PAY FOR and you can create fixed-format. Them's the breaks.

Sorry if I sound inflexible, but what I've, personally, been through with poetry over the past five years I would not wish on The Dursleys of Privet Drive (sorry--have been reading Potters for another thread around here somewhere on typos, or some bloody thing). There's something about poets' brains, particularly the "visual" ones, that just breaks this camel's back.

I tried, I did--but I learned the hard way that that way lies madness. Now, if a poet wants a book "that looks EXACTLY like..." we quote them for fixed-format. For a while, I'd stopped accepting poetry even for quotation, not because the coding itself was hard (it's not...just tedious), but because the inevitable endless emails that came once the ePUB was produced just were not covered by pricing. Now I charge a LOT for Poetry, even if it's simple, and the earth for FF. Period.

Hitch