Plugin: poetry
Author: Louis
Included in ikiwiki: no
Enabled by default: no
Included in goodstuff: no
Currently enabled: no

Poetry

The poetry plugin provides the ?poetry directive, used to render poetry (or songs).

Why?

Typography

In regular text, there are two different meaning of a new line: a break between two paragraphs, and the line wrap.

When rendering poetry, we need a third one: the carriage return between two verse lines. This one should be different from the line wrap carriage return, otherwise one will not be able to tell apart these two: is a word displayed at the begenning of its line a new verse line, or the previous verse line, continuing on a new line because it is too long?

Generally, wrapped text is indented, whereas verse lines are not.

Markdown

One could use carriage return (two white spaces at the end of a line) between verse lines, and paragraph break between stanzas, but:

• adding white spaces at the end of lines is painful;
• there is no easy way to render chorus (in a different way from verses).

Usage

The directive takes only one argument content, containing the poetry to render. Carriage returns are respected.

Chorus are lines with > as a starting character.

Lines starting with ) are consored/outdated/crossed out verses.

View example

[[!poetry  content="""
This is a verse
Made of several lines

> And here is the chorus
> La la la!
> A beautiful chorus

Another verse
A bit longer
Than the previous one

) This one is deleted
) Because I did not like it
"""]]

CSS

This plugin is useless without some corresponding CSS. An example is given below.

CSS

.poetry {
  padding-left: 1em;
  border-left: 0.1em solid lightgray;
  border-radius: 0.5em;
}

.poetry .stanza {
  padding-left: 1em;
}

.poetry .paren {
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: smaller;
  text-decoration: line-through;
}

.poetry .paren:hover {
  text-decoration: initial;
}

.poetry .chorus {
  margin-left: 0.1em;
  padding-left: 2em;
  border-left: 0.3em solid slategray;
}

.poetry .line {
  display: block;
  text-indent: -1em;
}

Example

This plugin is used to render songs on this choir's website.

Code

Code and documentation can be found here : https://spalax.frama.io/gresille-ikiwiki/poetry.