I’ve been working on Gerard’s poetry book …
… and although I’m very close to finished, I recently hit an extremely frustrating formatting snag.
Formatting the essay book wasn’t easy, but it was a piece of cake compared to formatting poetry. The settings that purport to be appropriate only work for short quotes from poems, and that just won’t do for a book. I figured out a work-around, but then the formatting is messed up for prose chapters such as an introduction and afterward.
You can have poetry or you can have prose, but the latter requires indented paragraphs in a print book (not online, of course) and the former doesn’t. I’ve had a correspondence about this with the help desk of the software program I use, and they said what I’m trying to do can’t be done. It took me ages to learn how to use this program and I’m not going to start all over again with another that might not even solve the problem.
I’ve decided to simply cut way back on any pose sections. After all, the poetry is the thing.
I’m just venting here.
Just leave the indenting in the prose sections and pretend they are poems.
That’s what a lot of the modern poets seem to do, to me.
I like rhyme, or at least metrical beats.
If I can take the line breaks out of a poem and see no difference to a prose paragraph, what is the point?
These were actually pretty good!
https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-art-of-the-tweet-collected-poems-of-donald-j-trump-back-in-stock
“Remember when logging into X (back when we called it Twitter) promised the possibility of a chuckle or maybe some witty insight from a very wise man?
It was a time not long ago when Donald J. Trump used the social media platform to share his every thought with the world.
Even his harshest critics must admit in the deepest cockles of their ice-cold hearts that Trump has a way with words. He’s an innovator, a bold and fearless leader, and he’s never afraid to say what everyone else is thinking. Yes, he’s even a poet. Because those tweets spaced properly and bound between the pages of a book become something more – they become a story, a message, a beacon of hope.”
Get your copy today! This offer not in stores. Some conditions may apply.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
(Seriously, good luck getting things to work out the way you want them to. Your efforts to share Gerard’s work with the world are truly a labor of love.)
AesopFan:
Yes, “prose poems” are such an odd concept. But I can’t indent anything in the book. I had to turn off inventing to get the poetry formatting to work, and it’s all or nothing. Can’t have it for some parts of the book and not others.
Makes one nostalgic for the old type-setting presses, no?
Hope you get the issues resloved. No doubt it is maddening. Computers can be all kinds of smart, and frustratingly stupid at the same time. I’m very much looking forward to the poetry book.
JWM
Can you format by sections?
You didn’t say what the format of the book will be – hard copy, digital, or both. And which software you are using (or *have to* use for the publisher/platform – ??)
Anyway, with MS Word, I can format text pretty much any way I want – especially using the Styles feature. So it’s hard to visualize the problems you are describing.
Watt:
I wrote in the post that the book is a print book. Formatting for a print book is more difficult, and for poetry it’s very difficult. The program I use, Atticus, can handle print book formatting quite well, but this is one glitch, it turns out.
Somebody may be willing to set it in LATEX for you, possibly someone here with knowledge (I’m sure there’s more than one commenter here) who would volunteer. LATEX is typesetting software and can handle just about any kind of book I imagine. People write books with it all the time… some examples of what people have done with poetry here and here.
Hi Neo. I asked Perplexity.ai (Google Gemini Pro), and got this answer. (Sorry about the length.)
Of course. This is a very common challenge for authors of hybrid-genre books, and your friend is not alone in her frustration.
The Core of the Problem
The difficulty arises because prose and poetry have fundamentally different formatting requirements:
* Prose: Typically formatted in justified paragraphs with a first-line indent. The goal is a clean, readable block of text.
* Poetry: Often requires precise control over line breaks, indentation (including staggered and hanging indents), and stanza spacing. The visual layout of the poem on the page is part of the art itself.
Book formatting software like Atticus is primarily designed for narrative fiction and non-fiction, which is mostly prose. While it has features for poetry, they are not as robust as a dedicated design program like Adobe InDesign. This can make it tricky to get the exact look a poet wants while maintaining standard prose formatting elsewhere.[1]
Yes, I can absolutely walk her through the best methods to format her book in Atticus. Here is a step-by-step guide she can follow.
Step-by-Step Guide to Formatting Prose and Poetry in Atticus
The main strategy is to use Atticus’s built-in styles to clearly distinguish between prose and poetry sections.
Step 1: Write or Paste in the Text
First, get all the content into the Atticus editor. Either write directly in the app or paste the text from another source. Don’t worry too much about the formatting at this stage; just get the words in place.[1]
Step 2: Format the Prose Sections
* For all the prose chapters or sections, leave the text as is. Atticus’s default settings are designed for prose.
* Ensure that paragraphs are separated by a single `Enter` key press. This will allow the book’s theme to apply the correct first-line indent automatically.
Step 3: Format the Poetry Sections
* This is the most important step. For each poem, you need to tell Atticus that it is not standard prose.
* Highlight an entire poem.
* In the formatting toolbar that appears above the text, find the **alignment options** (the icons that look like lines of text). Click the “quote” icon ( **”** ).[2]
* From the dropdown menu, select **Verse**.[1]
What the “Verse” Style Does:
* It typically centers the text block on the page, creating wider margins on the left and right.[1]
* It treats each line break as significant.
* It adds a bit more space between stanzas (paragraphs of the poem).[1]
Step 4: Fine-Tune the Poem’s Layout
* This is where you handle the specific needs of each poem.
* **For Stanza Breaks:** To create a space between stanzas, use a single `Enter`.
* **For Line Breaks Within a Stanza:** To force a line break without creating a new stanza, use a “soft return.” Hold down the **`Shift`** key while pressing **`Enter`**. This is the key to controlling your line breaks precisely.[1]
* **For Indentation:** Atticus has limited indentation options for poetry.[3]
* **First-Line Indent:** You cannot apply a standard first-line indent to poetry set in the “Verse” style.
* **Hanging Indent:** You can apply a hanging indent (where the first line is not indented but subsequent lines are) by selecting the stanza and choosing this option in the advanced formatting settings. This is a common poetry convention.[1]
* **Staggered Indents:** Atticus does not support complex, staggered indents. For this, a workaround is needed (see the “Advanced Workaround” section below).
Step 5: Preview, Preview, Preview
* Constantly use the **Preview** function in Atticus to see how your formatting looks.
* It is crucial to check both the **Ebook** and **Print** previews, as they can render differently. What looks good in print might not work well on a small e-reader screen.
Advanced Workaround for Complex Poetry Layouts
If a poem has a very specific visual design that Atticus cannot handle (like staggered lines or a unique shape), the most reliable solution is to format that specific poem outside of Atticus and import it as an image.
1. Format the poem exactly as you want it in a program like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or a simple design tool.
2. Save that single page as a high-resolution PNG or JPG image.
3. In Atticus, at the spot where the poem should go, use the **Add Image** button to insert your formatted poem.[2]
* **Trade-off:** The text in the image will not be searchable or resizable in an ebook, which is a significant drawback. This method should only be used for poems where the visual layout is absolutely essential to the work’s meaning.
By using these methods, your friend should be able to create a beautifully formatted book that seamlessly integrates both her prose and her poetry.
Neo – Nothing I have read by you has even remotely approached venting. And believe you me, I know venting. I have identical twin daughters age 32 who are quite masterful at the act of filling one’s ear with verbal saltiness. So go easy on yourself, you always come across as calm, poised, and candid as far as I am concerned.
I for one would be interested to know if the AI-generated advice actually makes sense and works as promised or if it has hallucinated features of Atticus.
No, it’s not a hallucination, Atticus does have a ‘verse’ setting. I’ve used it for something I’m very slowly working on which is mixed poetry and prose. I had to ask them how, and some while after that ask it turned up as a menu item.
Atticus… it looks interesting. Maybe if I ever try to write a book, I’ll consider it.
I just read through AppleBetty’s AI answer. Ai-yi-yi.
The AI answer suggests, as a last resort, importing a screenshot (essentially) from MS Word. Instead of that, per the Atticus homepage, supposedly you can do all your formatting in Word or another program and Import it into Atticus. Of course, that presumes that the user is used to exploiting Word’s formatting features. (I have my Styles and keyboard shortcuts preset to the max.) And who knows how neatly it would carry over.
I was also looking over my copy of Norton’s Anthology of Modern Poetry. Depending on the poet’s original formatting directives (if any), there are innumerable potential styles: indenting every second line of a stanza; every third line; one indent for the second line, two for the third line; no extra indents; centered text; etc, etc. In short, there is probably no way to use a Style feature in some overriding sense for poetry (unless every poem has the same structure). It’s line by line by line. (Hence the handiness of Word’s self-set keyboard shortcuts.)
Watt; AppleBetty; Elaine T:
Thanks, but I tried things like that even before I wrote the post. Summary: they didn’t work.
Short version of why is that Word settings don’t transfer properly to Atticus, the “soft return” etc, didn’t work even though AI had said it would, and Atticus’ “verse” setting only really works well for short excerpts. I could explain why the latter is true, but it would be tedious. Believe me, I tried. Yes, it corrects the indent problem, but it creates new problems that were insurmountable in that I could not create the poetry “look” I wanted.
Also, even in Word, it’s hard to create the exact look you want for a poem. In the book of Gerard’s essays, part of the intro I wanted was a poem as epigram. I had to do it in Word and save it as an image, which I did, but even then I could not get it to look exactly right. I had to compromise by centering the poem. But it was the only poem in that book.
Since the new book is about 98% poetry and 2% prose (if that), and the prose isn’t even necessary for the most part (how long does a bio of Gerard have to be, for example?), I’m just going to cut way back on the prose and make those sections all one paragraph long. That way, Atticus treats it as a first paragraph, which doesn’t need indentation or I can use the hanging indent format for those sections (which is allowed).
Hi Neo,
I’m sorry the AI advice didn’t help. Thanks for the feedback. It seems that the AI advice wasn’t crazy (you’d thought of it and tried it), but it didn’t work as advertised. I asked the AI and learned that it can only test its advice in the Python programming language. For everything else, it’s just searching and synthesizing.