letter spacing

I put a note up at curl.com today as I hope to see more options in Curl 8.0 for text formatting.

This arose when I was looking at the old University of California Press reprint of Mary Barnard's translation of fragments of Sappho.  That book has many nice features, such as the suppression of page numbers on poetry pages (the fragments themselves are numbered) and the Greek key pattern preceding each fragment number.

That book got me to thinking about stanza spacing and the advent of both line-spacing and word-spacing.

A large part of what distinguishes poetry from prose is the line - and spacing can be as essential as the choice of font.

One Canadian poetry e-journal rejects submissions with spacing not to the editor's taste (this may reflect his frustration with HTML+CSS as much as anything aesthetic.)

I can only hope that Curl 8.0 will offer the spacing features that we are currently denied by HTML, CSS, IE and Microsoft.  Curl does allow control of line-spacing at this time (negative values compress, positive expand, the default.)

Sternbild Reiterlein and Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus on Mizar and Alcor

In the eleventh of the first Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke teases us as to whether there is an asterism "Rider" - and of course there is; Mizar and Alcor [Alkor], the "Reiterlein".

This has been ignored by translators, who can then make no sense of

  Neue Weite. Und die zwei sind eins.

In pursuit of a partial rhyme, Willis Barnstone veers off into 'galaxy'.

Mizar and Alcor are not just two stars.  Rilke has chosen "the little rider".

These two are bound as a binary, known now to be a sextet, part of the U. Ma. Moving Group drifting past us through our arm of the galaxy: not of this world of ours and not always to be with those on earth as a 'Sternbild'.

The U. Ma. Moving Group has been known since 1869.

Curl Markup

While I usually import the layout declarations so that they do not clutter my view of a file containing a poem in Curl markup such as

{poem
   {stanza
      the first
      couplet
   }
   {stanza
      the second
      couplet
   }
}

here is a simple Curl page with a StyleSheet declaration:


{curl 7.0 applet}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "utf8"}

{def styl_em =
    {StyleSheet
        {StyleRule "text.emphasis",
            font-style = "italic",
            font-weight = "bold"
        }
    }
}

{paragraph style-manager = {BasicStyleManager styl_em},
  
    {text style-class = "emphasis",

             this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight
    }
  
}

The resulting page is simply:

this text will be presented as italic font-style with bold font-weight