Converting Old English Poetry

[JohnO]

Greetings,

I'm using BookDesigner to convert Old English poetry to LRF, or more to the point I'm having real trouble.

Each line needs to be broken into two half-lines, for example:

Welund him be wurman.....wræces cunnade,
anhydig eorl earfoþa.....dreag,
hæfde him to gesiþþe.....sorge ond longaþ,
wintercealde wræce;.....wean oft onfond,
siþþan hine Niðhad on.....nede legde,
swoncre seonobende.....on syllan monn.
þæs ofereode,.....þisses swa mæg!

where the ..... represents spaces.

So far I have not found a way to force BD to honour the spaces between the half-lines.

Non-breaking spaces (   ) just get collapsed into a single whitespace.
Using CSS (whitespace: pre) is ignored.
I suppose I could embed transparent gifs, but that's not really satisfactory.

Any suggestions?

beoð ge gesunde

John O