Verse, epigraphs and letters

Most of LibreTimes Markdown is shaped by mathematics and teaching. These blocks come from books: a poem whose line breaks matter, an epigraph over a chapter, a letter quoted inside a novel, the page numbers of the printed edition. They work in any document, not only in books.

The rule behind them is the rule of the whole dialect: the markup says what a passage is, and the page decides how it looks. You never set a font, a size or a margin; you say "this is verse" or "this is an epigraph", and every place the text appears (the page, an export, a screen reader) treats it as one.

Verse

In ordinary text a single line break means nothing: the paragraph reflows. In verse the line is the unit, so inside :::verse every line stays a line and a blank line separates stanzas:

:::verse
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
 
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
:::

Indented lines

Indentation in a poem carries meaning: rhyme scheme, metre, a change of speaker. In verse, and only in verse, leading spaces are kept. Every two spaces are one indent level, up to three levels:

:::verse
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
  Two Owls and a Hen,
  Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'
:::

• Use spaces, not tabs, and count in twos: two spaces is level 1, four is level 2, six is level 3. Anything deeper stays at level 3.
• Outside :::verse leading spaces mean nothing (and four of them start a code block), so this only works inside the block.
• Formatting inside a line works as usual: emphasis, maths, links.
• A line too long for the screen wraps with a hanging indent, so a reader never mistakes the wrapped part for a new line.

Epigraph

An epigraph is a quotation that stands at the head of a chapter or a document and frames what follows:

:::epigraph
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
 
--- Leo Tolstoy, *Anna Karenina*, translated by Constance Garnett
:::

It is not a blockquote. A blockquote is someone's words inside your argument; an epigraph stands outside it. The attribution is written as ordinary text, exactly as you want it shown.

Dedication

:::dedication
To my teachers
:::

A dedication is set apart and centred, the way it is on its own page in a printed book.

Letter

A letter, a note or a diary entry quoted inside a narrative:

:::letter
Dear Watson,
 
I shall be at the station at nine. Bring your revolver.
 
Yours,\
S. H.
:::

The block marks the whole passage as the letter, so its salutation, body and signature stay together and read as a document inside the text. A backslash at the end of a line keeps the next line on its own, as in the signature above; without it, "Yours," and "S. H." would join into one line.

Small capitals

:sc[...] sets a few words in small capitals, where the source uses them to mean something: a name on its first appearance, a sign, a heading inside the text.

He read the brass plate on the door: :sc[Dr. Henry Jekyll].

Use it only where the capitals carry a distinction in the original. For emphasis, use italic or bold.

Printed page numbers

An edition that follows a printed book can mark where each printed page begins, so a reader can cite it against the print:

...and so the argument closes. :pb[412]The next chapter opens on the
following morning.

• :pb[412] takes the page number, arabic (412) or roman (xiv, common in front matter). Anything else is left as the literal text you typed.
• It leaves the flow of the text alone. On a wide screen the number appears in the left margin, like a margin note in a scholarly edition.
• Each marker is a link target: #p412 goes straight to page 412, so a citation can point at the exact page.

Scene breaks

A break between scenes needs no block of its own. It is a horizontal rule (--- on its own line), and in a book's reading mode it is typeset as the centred asterism a printed novel uses.