Hanging indents in poetry format: persistent problems

  • Unknown's avatar
    wizzyd2008 · Member ·

    I’ve run literary magazines with sites powered by WordPress for years. And I have never gotten a sufficient answer to how to format poetry correctly.

    Let me
    explain.

    Poetry
    has
    line breaks.

    Sometimes,
    a poem’s lines
    are longer than this, in fact, they will be long

    and they will use blank
    spaces

    and when that happens, when lines goes really, really long, it’s the proper format–in print at least–to have a hanging indent.

    That last bit right there should have a hanging indent. That’s because, if this content area of page were allowed to widen–another limit of WordPress’s functionalities–that line would go all the way from one end of the screen to another.

    I am sure coders and people with a much better grasp on website design have figured how to have a Walt Whitman-length line appear correctly on screen. For we mere mortals using WordPress, however, we’ve had to do workarounds.

    For examples: the ever-popular Shift+Enter for line breaks and a couple non-repeating blank spaces to emulate, hopefully, what a long line would look on the page.

    Or maybe urging readers to look at the site on a desktop in full screen.

    But it’s 2021, and I can’t for the life of me believe WordPress hasn’t figured out how to format poetry correctly.

    Oh, the 

     tag, you say? It might work. 

If I wanted a  poem to look like a block quote from a novel, or if most of the themes didn't also include a background color.

What about decreasing the default size in the Gutenberg block editor? Maybe. But I wear glasses, and I can't see what's going on because the type is so small.

Maybe a PDF plugin for those high-rolling wordpress.org endusers? 

Tried that. It makes poems look like legal briefs. And that's only if the plugin works.

How about a trusty JPG screenshot of a Word file, inserted into the post? 

Tried that, too. That option is just sad. 

What other options are there, besides WordPress dispatching someone, anyone, to finally address poetry format issues? 

I'm laying this on WordPress because it's the CMS I've used for over a decade, but it's the internet's problem as well, to be sure. 

But why, oh why, in this year or our lord 2021, does it take so much effort to make poems look like poems in the WordPress content management system?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-doublebassd · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Since you have the CSS upgrade via the Premium Plan, you can actually create a class for all hanging indents as my colleague explains here:

    https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/html-css-for-hanging-indent-poetry/#post-3277851

    Please take a look and us know if you have any other questions.

    Thanks!

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