Format Concrete Poetry - stitched

I am typing up poetry, and one of the pieces is a concrete poem. Getting this into MS Word is going to take some advanced contortionist skills!

image: cottonbro

Adding a text box can sometimes provide a quick fix, but the location sometimes jumps or the spacing may be finicky. If you need to push letters (or words) up/down for positioning, check out the menu option Formatting > Font...

Under the Advanced tab, you can push each letter up or down by a specific amount. If you type out the word first, you would then highlight each letter you want to shift and make the adjustment. In this screenshot, I'm preparing to raise the position of the letter "h" after having raised "t" twice.



When's the last time you were working with concrete poetry (electronically or on paper)?

Comments

  1. I'm working on a verse novel, and am using Scrivener. Scrivener has a "preserve formatting" option, once I have the spacing I prefer. Then I migrate the MS to Word to send to my agent. The migration from Scrivener to Word is not perfect, but it's better than not preserving the original formatting. I'll have to take a look at this option in Word more closely. It may fix some of my issues with fine tuning spacing. Thanks!

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  2. Sounds like this approach might be an over-complicated fix for what you're describing. I'd suggest looking at the Format > Paragraph menu item and adjust the spacing after each paragraph.

    I've never used Scrivener, though, so maybe I'm not quite catching where your formatting goes awry?

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