Poetry in txt to HTML conversion

[gbnewby]

Discussed among WWers and catalogers: This is for files that are native .txt, and get automatically converted to HTML as part of ebookmaker.

The problem is that spacing in poetry gets ignored. The easiest partial solution is to insert
or similar whenever there is a space at the start of a line.

Problematic generated HTML may be seen, for example, here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60909
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60910

Compare the .txt to the generated .htm. When a new line begins with upper case, it's treated as a paragraph. When a new line begins with lower case, it's treated as part of the previous paragraph.

Email pgww (or gutcat) if you want further examples or to discuss solutions. Thanks for considering this.

[eshellman]

I can't think of any way to fix these without breaking conversion of thousands of non poetry files.
workarounds include:

• wrapping the poetry in html by hand with <pre>
• using rst markup instead of plain text
• inventing new markup
• magic

[eshellman]

We've seen a lot of problems with poetry in html books where <br> is used in conjunction with a css rule hiding br in a block span. kindlegen can't handle more than 10K hidden characters.