Displaying Poetry on the Web

large image Text on a Page with Dappled light

A couple of times recently this has presented a problem and an interesting challenge.

Poets create their work with a view to wanting a particular layout of the words. Some may prefer the lines centred and others left aligned. Some poets may want their poems displayed with the wrapped line (where it is a long line) centred or right aligned.

So what would be the best way to display poems? What have others done to resolve this complex issue?

furthermore...

I should qualify the question slightly though. There needs to be some rules to enable the poets or the editors of poetry to be able to post the poems onto a site without resorting to complex tagging. The reason for this is that I am using here and there - ExpressionEngine with TinyMCE added in for the wysywig editing.

Firstly, we need to define some things here (I am not a poetry expert - so correct me if I have this wrong):

Line - a line of poetry - obvious I suppose, but it should be separated from the next line by a soft return (or forced line break) - not a full return which is technically a paragraph break. Between the lines we should have <br /> and between the verses we need <p>.

Now comes the first problem that is specific to the web; if the line is very long then how do we deal with the wrapping of the line? Should it simply happen as the need arises or should the poet / editor have the control over where this break in the line appears? If the latter then, the poet needs to enter a soft return at the point that they wish to make the line break, however, this is the same as a new line!

Often a poet will indent the second part of a line to distinguish it from a new line. How much is the indent? Does the poet have control? I have struggled with this, and I see that Googling the problem, others have too.

Bruce Lawson has explained the problem very well and asks for some future features to be added to CSS version3. Comments by others leads me to realise that all solutions are some form of compromise. Whatever you do - negative indents and the like - as soon as the user enlarges the font (which they are fully entitled to do) then everything goes haywire.

It might be worth reflecting on how things happen on paper at this point and typically, what goes on with MS Word. To make things appear correctly, a poet would probably hit the tab key a few times. This, is not appropriate, for the web, so we can only use spaces.

What have I done on this site: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre.

This is an ExpressionEngine CMS site, so the editor must be able to choose from some alternative layouts when entering a poem I did this with a drop down selector in the entry form. The drop down includes 'Centered', 'Pre-formatted', 'Aligned-Right', 'Smaller Font'. With these options most 'special cases' can be resolved. The default is aligned left. I havn't come across the desire for 'justified' poetry. Good thing!

The problem of aligning a wrapped line is still not easily resolved, although the poet / editor can enter spaces to force the line along. The does result in ugly non-breaking spaces in the code, but this is better than expecting an editor or poet to enter in some special span tag.

Because the web is a fluid medium we have to tolerate different viewing conditions. If the layout is fluid and width can change then the poet cannot be sure that the text will not wrap in the wrong places. Here the solution could be to 'fix' the width. To what dimension though? Do we target a 800x600 window? or wider? Don't forget, though, that the user is entitled to change the size of the font and this may throw things out in any case.

Flash or PDF

Yes, these could be amongst the final  winners. After all, you could say, that out of all text situations, the poem must display how the author intended. PDF would be a solution but it leads to a very complex work flow and user experience. Flash could be used but again, it doesn't lend itself to easy editing.

Posted on 09 Mar around 11am

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