[XeTeX] issue with vertical space in verse

[John Was]

Hello Pablo

You can use the tabular commands of plain TeX to have the lines of a poem 
centred optically on the longest line, which is the usual convention for 
poetry:

\unskip \par

\tabskip 0pt plus \hsize

\halign to \hsize{%

#\hfil\cr

}\par



Then just type in your poem (after the line of the above code that ends with 
\cr), and put \cr at the end of every line.  If you want some lines kept 
together (at least the first and last lines of the poem usually, to avoid 
widows and orphan poetry lines), just type \noalign{\nobreak} between lines 
of the poem.



If instead of having the poem optically centred on the longest line, you 
prefer to have the lines indented by say 2em at the left, just change the 
table definition accordingly:



\unskip \par

\tabskip 2em

\halign to \hsize{%

#\hfil\tabskip 0pt plus \hsize\cr

}\par



This works in plain TeX - I don't know if it will work exactly thus in 
LaTeX, or whether you will need to set up a particular 'environment' for it.



John






----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Pablo Rodríguez" <oinos at web.de>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and Linux" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 7:12 PM
Subject: [XeTeX] issue with vertical space in verse


> Hi there,
>
> I would like to add two verses to a text, using either the verse or even
> the quote environment (I don't really care), but the issue I find is
> that (as expected) both environments add an extra vertical space. Does
> anyone know how I could remove this extra vertical space?
>
> As a workaround, I thought that specifying an extra left skip or margin
> might suit my needs. But neither \setlength{\leftskip}{2em} nor
> \setlength{\leftmargin}{2em} changes the left indentation on following
> paragraphs. Sorry but how could I get left and right indentation?
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
>
> Pablo
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