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Keeping Physical Structure in a Poetry Submission

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Grinrain

One Mad, Bad One
Joined
Apr 13, 2011
Posts
23
Have a question, maybe two.

How do I keep the physical structure of a poem I submit? I have a poem where some lines I would like to start flush with the left margin, some indented once, some indented twice. If the poem is that way in the word doc I submit, will it be kept or do I need special characters I need to include?

I also noted that I need a special key sequence to turn on italics. Do the italics stay on till turned off or will I need to turn them on for each line? Is the sequence to turn them off the same as the sequence to turn them on?

Long time reader, first time contributor, sorry for the newb-like questions.

Grin
 
You're better off formatting it yourself in the text box.
Here's a link for HTML formatting:
http://www.simplehtmlguide.com/text.php
(It's simple, don't worry)
For spacing, the space bar
By formatting it yourself, you can preview it to make sure it looks the way you want it to.

Look forward to seeing it.
 
You used to be able to put in a note asking for special alignment, I presume you still can.
 
Sounds great. Entered in to the text box and the box shows too few characters that it is worrisome. Where do I send the note?
 
Grinrain said:
Sounds great. Entered in to the text box and the box shows too few characters that it is worrisome. Where do I send the note?
Click to expand...

Where you submit, if you scroll down there is another box underneath which it says 'You may include any special instructions in the Notes field. These comments will not be shown on the site, they will only be read by the webmaster before posting the submission on the site. If you used the volunteer editing program, you should include the name of your editor in this box.'
 
In HTML (or XML), you can force a space with the   (non-breaking-space) character. You will need to enter quite a lot of them to get much of an indentation, as Lit uses a proportional font, so spaces don't take up a lot of space. And the preview and the actual post will be close, but slightly different.

Here's an example. This poem makes extensive use of indentation. The text used to enter this in the submission box was
Your world won't be my world, nor could it be,
        For circumstances alter through the years
                And history won't <i>quite</i> repeat again,
Though hunger, war, and suffering you'll see
        Aplenty—any world that's real endures
                These evil things. What counts is how and when
And with how much intensity you fight
        To minimize the damage that occurs
                In adversity. That is how men
Leave their only mark. Grow strong, do right.
                        <i>Amen.</i>​
The <i> and </i> tags are turning italics on and off.

It's a little trying to do (you type a lot of  ), but if you're trying to get a standard indentation, you can cut and paste all the lines after the first one.
 
Ooh, thanks Tzara, new info for me. Much appreciated.

And if on a standard computer you should be able to type it once, then just copy and paste it where you want it. It can be done from tablets and phones too, just not with keyboard shortcuts.
 
A week ago, I submitted my poem requesting help keeping the format. Since then, I have not heard back. Is this usual, am I looking in the wrong place for a reply, or do you think I did something wrong?

If I am going to format the poem myself, need a bit more understanding on how the HTML is going to work here. I see how to indent, but does anyone know how long a line is? I worry that one line in Word the way I have margins set is not going to be one line of text here.
 
Grinrain said:
A week ago, I submitted my poem requesting help keeping the format. Since then, I have not heard back. Is this usual, am I looking in the wrong place for a reply, or do you think I did something wrong?

If I am going to format the poem myself, need a bit more understanding on how the HTML is going to work here. I see how to indent, but does anyone know how long a line is? I worry that one line in Word the way I have margins set is not going to be one line of text here.
Click to expand...
In HTML/XML, line breaks are made with the <br> (or <br />) tag. However, when you type your text into the Lit submission box, it will insert these (invisibly) for you every time you hit the ENTER key (just like how a text editor would do).

So in the example earlier, I actually stripped the <br /> tags out of the source because you don't need to put those in yourself.

So just as typing in a poem here in the forum,
You type in the first line
then second
then third
and so on. For a blank line, hit ENTER twice

like this.​
 
I understand that part, but some of my lines might be too long. Which means of course the text will wrap and I will not have the forced indention. About how long is a line of text so I know when I need to break what I wrote.
 
Grinrain said:
I understand that part, but some of my lines might be too long. Which means of course the text will wrap and I will not have the forced indention. About how long is a line of text so I know when I need to break what I wrote.
Click to expand...
The line length will be dependent on various things like the device you're viewing the page with, screen size, the browser and version, the operating system, etc. If I look at a page on my iPhone, I get quite a different line length than if I view it on one of my PCs, though the site managers have tried to minimize the differences by making the text area a fixed width based on browser and type. So I get more or less the same view on my Windows 8.1 PC with IE 11 as I do on my Windows Vista PC with Chrome.

Formatting text, especially poetry, is a traditional problem with HTML, as it doesn't give the developer real control over how the text is rendered.

If you're really picky about it, you can submit an image of your poem in the Illustrated category, but there are size limitations there as well, though on the size of the illustration rather than the line length.

Your best guesstimate is to copy a line out of a story that pretty much fills a page and paste that into your word processor as a guideline. On my PCs, Lit seems to default to 9 point Verdana, so set your WP to that as well.
 
I think I misunderstood your question. Are you asking how to tell if a line you're forced indentation on using the   character is going to wrap?

That isn't an easy thing to answer. The preview pane gives you something of an idea, but it uses a different font (at least on my systems) than the submission window, which is different from the one that gets published to the site. It should be close, but won't be exact (and is subject to browser/screen size/OS, etc. variations).

When I want to do something that I think might be a problem, I copy the source for a poem page (the XML itself), strip the title and text out, and replace it with mine (which now would need the <br> tags in it and see what it looks like. But you have to know at least a little about HTML/XML to do that.

And it's still dependent on all those other things.
 
Pretty much that is the issue. I wrote in Word using 11 point Calibri and my standard margin widths. I am not sure how long a line I can use before the Lit system forces a crlf so I would need to use the indent process for the spill over. Some lines will look fine until I indent them for structure and then I have the same issue.

At this point, I am hoping the Lit master editor is fixing my errors, thus how long it has taken to publish the poem. Going to be anti-climatic now I think.

Thank you for all your help. Was planning on this being an exercise in non-technical writing, not in XML.
 
Grinrain said:
Pretty much that is the issue. I wrote in Word using 11 point Calibri and my standard margin widths. I am not sure how long a line I can use before the Lit system forces a crlf so I would need to use the indent process for the spill over. Some lines will look fine until I indent them for structure and then I have the same issue.

At this point, I am hoping the Lit master editor is fixing my errors, thus how long it has taken to publish the poem. Going to be anti-climatic now I think.

Thank you for all your help. Was planning on this being an exercise in non-technical writing, not in XML.
Click to expand...
If you want to send it to me, I can take a quick look at it on my system, though that wouldn't tell you how it would look on a Mac or, more importantly, on a tablet or phone.
 
Wow, thank you. My goal would for it to look good on a standard browser. Smart phones and tablets will have to look after themselves. Its in word, so I would need an email address.
 
Grinrain said:
Wow, thank you. My goal would for it to look good on a standard browser. Smart phones and tablets will have to look after themselves. Its in word, so I would need an email address.
Click to expand...
I'll send you a PM (assuming you have it turned on).
 
I recently posted a few poems, my first here. Three of them, A SWEET FUCK, MY LISTS, and YOU (click my postings link below and scroll down) all contain lines with leading spaces. Especially MY LISTS, where each of the 33 lines is preceded by n-1 spaces. The other poems are indented haiku. I didn't use   or any HTML -- the text was a flat .TXT file created in Notepad. I pasted the text into the entry window -- I don't submit .DOC or .RTF or .ODT files.

What you will NOT get with any submissions here are fixed-width fonts, so lines cannot be aligned vertically. What you DO get is limited HTML control. You can use the <b> (bold), <u> (underline), <i> (italics), <blockquote> (indent), and <center> tags. Otherwise, your formatting options are the spacebar and CAPS keys.
 
Great poem, but you only had to worry about the left margin. I am afraid my lines extend to far to the left, so I need to worry about the line widths.

I submitted over a week ago, guess I will wait another couple of days before I try this myself.

At this point, I am afraid I will get it wrong, become frustrated and turn into a Fox network loving ditto head republican. Then sex will be just between a man and a woman, married to each other, in the dark, in the bedroom, in flannels.
 
Grinrain said:
Great poem, but you only had to worry about the left margin. I am afraid my lines extend to far to the left, so I need to worry about the line widths.
Click to expand...
You could shoot me a copy and I'll see if it might be adaptable. PM me for my email addy.

At this point, I am afraid I will get it wrong, become frustrated and turn into a Fox network loving ditto head republican. Then sex will be just between a man and a woman, married to each other, in the dark, in the bedroom, in flannels.
Click to expand...
A common fate of frustrated poets, alas.

Of course, you could always try writing C&W songs. Then you'd fit in there.

[rant]
Most of the Anglophone world has little use for poets, which is why the pros have day jobs as teachers or editors. But songwriters are respected, or at least paid. What's the difference between a songwriter and a poet? Royalties.
[/rant]
 
Hypoxia said:
[rant]
Most of the Anglophone world has little use for poets, which is why the pros have day jobs as teachers or editors. But songwriters are respected, or at least paid. What's the difference between a songwriter and a poet? Royalties.
[/rant]
Click to expand...

Songwriters are usually musicians and are f-ing broke. The serious ones don't care about the money, they just do what they love, despite being penniless for most of their careers.

One of my favorites is Joe Purdy. A shit ton of albums, TV placements and he just gets by. Cobbles old equipment together, enlists friends and just gets on with it. He's independent and does it because he can't not do it.

Songwriters get paid because they have a salable commodity.
 
Grinrain said:
I understand that part, but some of my lines might be too long. Which means of course the text will wrap and I will not have the forced indention. About how long is a line of text so I know when I need to break what I wrote.
Click to expand...
If formatting is of major concern, submit the word file as you want it to appear. This will take a while to post in new poems since manual submissions, like the illustrated stories and poems are only uploaded to the server periodically. Good luck. You can see how to do this by checking this thread
 
I must agree with champagne1982. I received your DOCX and I don't see a clean way to replicate the formatting in TXT/HTML. Nice evocative poem, BTW.
 
Hypoxia,
Thank you for your kind words. I submitted on July 29th, will wait another week or two and see what happens.

"Watches clock"
 
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