E-book publishing: line break alert

At parties you are boring. That is your disguise.

For years I've thought that:

  • poetry would be ideal content for reading on mobile phones
  • the best phone poems would be tiny little simple ones
  • I was just the person to write these phone poems
  • but first, someone needed to invent the iPhone.

Finally it happened: the iPhone in its second year is perfect for poetry. So in my spare time I'm sorting out three little collections of these mainly mini-poems.

Now I'm being punished for a terrible habit with Word. I've always used paragraph breaks for line breaks in poetry, working in Default style. Bad me!

I haven't read much poetry on my iPhone (and it's been pretty awful so far). But one thing's obvious: paragraph breaks show as paragraph breaks, which is ridiculous at the end of every line. And which means a huge gap between verses.

So now I have to change those slack paragraph breaks to line breaks. But wait! Not all of them! I still need paragraph breaks at the end of verses, so I can't use a script that changes them all. No, they have to be changed and checked individually.

Serves me right.

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