Best way of formatting stanzas of poetry for .epub export?

[focksbot]

Hi all,

I found a year-old thread on this but couldn't find any definitive answer on it, as the persons answering didn't really seem to understand what was being asked.

Here's the issue: exporting to .epub removes double-returns. Double returns constitute stanza breaks in lineated poetry, so they need to stay. You can't just add space-after to a paragraph style because this adds space after every line of the poem, rather than just at the stanza break.

You also can't just use shift-return in place of line breaks in order to keep every stanza as an unbroken paragraph, because poetry should be formatted with hanging indents for lines that are broken by the width of the page or screen.

So the only solution I have is to use a different paragraph style for the final line of every stanza. This seems overly complicated and is also tedious in terms of workflow. Does anyone have any better solutions?

[Dan Greyhound]

What I ended up doing was to run a find-and-replace for double returns to replace these with a return and a line break. The line breaks then didn't affect the text, only the line of white between text lines.

Then make sure that the 'remove forced line breaks' option is unchecked when converting to epub.

Before doing all this make sure there aren't any line breaks in the text that actually shouldn't be there.

The response I got to my previous post still annoys me so thanks for the support!

[Willi Adelberger]

Never use succeeding returns to create space between text lines. It is a no-go in print and in epub.

[focksbot]

For reasons I've explained elsewhere, this is not a very helpful or
intelligent response. When typesetting poetry, you are working with
manuscripts sent to you, sometimes in pieces, by a variety of authors. The
double line breaks are already there when you import the content (because
authors are not designers). That InDesign doesn't offer any tools for
automating the process of converting this content to reflowable format is a
clear design oversight.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Sorry. Now, as then, you just "want" ID and EPUB to work in a nonstandard, archaic way. Multiple styles are the only way to achieve the format you want, especially for reliable format to EPUB. (Not all readers handle line-breaks the same way; some ignore them.)

Just because a technique works on typewriters and in Word doesn't mean tools with more sophisticated approaches and typographical control are somehow lacking.

[focksbot]

I want ID, ideally, to provide me with the tools for working efficiently
with the kind of manuscripts and files that are sent to me by authors, yes.
It's odd that you think this an unreasonable expectation. As it is, I will
simply have to keep making up for this design flaw with extra labour, going
through each poem that is supplied to me stanza by stanza, until such a
time as a sensible feature for automatically converting double line-breaks
is added to the software.

It's sightly faster than writing my own code for e-books in Sigil, but not
by much.

[Dan Greyhound]

What I find really annoying is that it used to work but someone somewhere decided that it wasn't the 'right' way to do things so just took out that functionality. Thus ignoring the way 99.9% of books are set-up. I don't know why a small vocal majority on this forum think this is reasonable. The programmers should work with how the world is, not how they think it should be.

[Willi Adelberger]

With stanza I work with forced returns, the only purpose I use it. Every verse is a paragraph with several forced returns.

In the paragraph style I define the distance of paragraphs of the same style with the space I want ot have between verses. This space is kept in EPUB and of course in PDF export.

[focksbot]

Forced returns are the same as soft returns, no? The problem with this is
that if the stanza is treated as a single para, and you're using a hanging
indent (as you should, since lines will be split by users who increase the
font size or are using small screens), every line but the first will end up
with a hanging indent.

You would also need to go through an imported MS line by line. I'm working
with poems and sets of poems that are sent to me as Word or Google docs,
sometimes even in the bodies of emails, and it's a shame there doesn't seem
to be a way of handling this material with the application of a single
style.