Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. Some great ideas here. So far Travis's approach has worked best--with some little alterations mainly for making lines wrap elegantly and for working around problems with e-book readers. Here's the css:
.verse-container div {margin-left: 7em; text-indent: -2em;} .verse-container div span {display: block; float: left; margin-left: -5em;} .hypermetric div {margin-left: 6em; text-indent: -2em;} .hypermetric div span {display: block; float: left; margin-left: -4em;}
I substituted div for p because Stanza insists on its own formatting for p. And I use em instead of px to scale better with the device. The HTML looks like this:
<div class="verse-container"> <div>Oft him ānhaga āre gebīdeð,</div> <div>Metudes miltse, þēah þe hē mōdcearig</div> <div>geond lagulāde longe sceolde</div> <div>hrēran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ,</div> <div><span>5</span>wadan wræclāstas. Wyrd bið ful ārǣd.</div> </div>
Nice and clean. The only remaining problem is that the Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) e-book reader doesn't move the left margin of the span as far left as the CSS tells it to do, and this causes collisions between line number and line in the hypermetric verses, where the left margin is narrower and there's less margin for error. So I've had to make the left margin wider than I had it before to compensate. It looks like a waste of space on an iPod screen, but in a browser window the spaciousness is rather pleasant.
Grant Simpson's approach looked to be working well, but it ran afoul of a bug in the Stanza reader, which for some reason makes a block containing a line number disappear unless it is inside the div for the line. Don't ask me why: but as I've been haunting the mobileread forums for a couple of weeks I can say that the CSS processing in Stanza and ADE is well known to be flaky.
I expect the e-book reader in the iPad to be much better, as it will presumably use the Safari layout engine.
Thanks again to everyone, Peter
Travis Brown wrote:
The code below is too busy. You can get by with fewer classes and something more semantically concise. Though it's arguable if this is the correct approach. Line numbers are not content – they are essentially a layout item.
See it here in action with a couple other options: http://flightdeckmedia.com/line-numbering/
.verse-container p { margin: 0; padding: 0; line-height: 17px; margin-left: 20px; } .verse-container p span { display: block; float:left; margin-left: -20px; }
<div class="verse-container"> <p>Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote</p> <p>The droghte of March hath perced to the roote</p> <p>And bathed every veyne in swich licour,</p> <p>Of which vertu engendred is the flour;</p> <p><span>5.</span>Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete <br /> breeth</p> <p>Inspired hath in every holt and heeth</p> <p>The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne</p> <p>Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,</p> <p>And smale foweles maken melodye,</p> <p><span>10.</span>That slepen al the nyght with open eye-</p> <p>(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);</p> <p>Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages</p> <p>And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes</p> <p>To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;</p> <p><span>15.</span>And specially from every shires ende</p> <p>Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,</p> </div>
Regards,
Travis
On 2010-03-17, at 5:56 PM, Simpson, Grant Leyton wrote:
Dear Peter,
How about the following:
<div class="vl"> hrēran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ, </div> <div class="n">5</div> <div class="vl"> wadan wræclāstas. Wyrd bið ful ārǣd. </div>
div.vl {margin-left:6em; text-indent: -2em;} div.n { float: left; }
This way, all the verse lines have the same class and the number div is before the line it applies to, not in it.
I tried it on IE 8, FF 3.6, Chrome 5, Safari 4, and Safari on the iPhone. Worked with no problem. If you'd like me to check it with IE 7, I can tomorrow. I wouldn't worry about IE 6.
Best, Grant Simpson Senior Analyst/Programmer, Office of the Registrar Doctoral Student, Department of English Indiana University Bloomington
On Mar 17, 2010, at 4:20 PM, Peter Baker wrote:
I've been struggling with the problem of laying out medieval poetry in HTML using just CSS. The problem is with line numbers, which usually appear to the left (sometimes to the right) of the poem; yet the left margin of the poem should remain even, and lines should wrap nicely, with extra space on the left after a wrap.
Much, perhaps most of the poetry I've seen on the web is laid out with tables, which is a bad hack, and less than ideal in several different ways. For my online Old English anthology site I worked out a system which is just barely okay: but it tends to fall apart under stress--i.e. when a browser window is made too narrow. Since I've been trying to format poetry so it displays well on an iPhone or other small screen, this will not do.
Here's my solution, with a screenshot. It still seems less than ideal, and my question for anyone who has struggled to present medieval poetry well on screen, is whether you have a system that is better and are willing to share it here.
My current solution involves enclosing each line in a div with class "vl" (verse-line). *Numbered* lines, on the other hand, go in a div with class "vln" (numbered-verse-line). The <div class="vln"> lines start with a div containing the line number. So here:
<div class="vl"> hrēran mid hondum hrīmcealde sǣ, </div> <div class="vln"> <div>5</div> wadan wræclāstas. Wyrd bið ful ārǣd. </div>
Now the CSS:
div.vl {margin-left:6em; text-indent: -2em;} div.vln {margin-left:6em; text-indent: -6em;} div.vln div {float:left; width:4em; color:black;}
And that gives you something like the attached: good on an iPhone or a computer (Firefox, Safari, Opera, *probably* IE but I haven't tested there yet). I also have a variant for Old English hypermetric lines but won't bore you with that.
Things I don't like: having different classes for lines with and without line numbers; having the line-number div inside the line div (the alternatives I've tried tend to break *somewhere*). It would be nice if the line numbers somehow escaped being copied to the clipboard with the text, but that would surely be asking too much.
If anyone is interested in sharing solutions, I'd be very grateful!
Peter Baker
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