[XeTeX] Bidipoem for dialogue poetry

[Gareth Hughes]

Shlama Mezdathkane (Hi XeTeXnicians)!

I'm using bidipoem to set some Syriac dialogue poems. I'm using the
traditionalpoem environment as each line is fourteen syllable long with
a caesura after the seventh syllable. So far, so good. However, as it's
a dialogue poem the speaker changes every other line, and these lines
are introduced with the name of the speaker followed by a colon.

As you can see from my attached example, the persona is included as a
part of the first hemistich, but to make the lines look nice it is also
included in the following three hemistiches within \phantom{} commands.
I also need to set \poemcolsep to -1em to close the 'phantom' gap. I
hope that makes sense.

Well, the problem is that it's not a pretty workaround and the beginning
of the first hemistich of each line doesn't line up, because personae
are of different lengths. I suppose I need some means of marking up each
line as having

	persona: first-hemistich & second-hemistich

and then working out how to set them properly. Any ideas how best to go
about this?

Thanks,

Gareth.
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