And while we're at it why not clean up some of those smerary lines in some of
Matisse's intaglii, soften some of those sharp corners in Picasso and Braque,
and best of all, get rid of some of those pesky Chinese ideograms in the Cantos
that nobody can understand anyway--because let's face it--there's just nothing
like a good solid rectangular block of nice, tightly kerned good old
Times-Roman. I'm certain that's what Pound had in mind.

And you're right--you should let sleeping logs die--you posited this same
argument a year or so ago. And people who still use Tex are still blockheads.

Gavin

Tim Romano wrote:

> Tim,
> Any reason why you eschewed CSS?  One could wrap each line-segment in a
> <div> and specify the indentations in style, using custom classes:
>
> .in1 {
> text-indent: 6em;
> }
>
> .in2 {
> text-indent: 9em;
> }
>
> That would get rid of the phalanx of non-breaking spaces.
>
> On a literary note: I'm not yet convinced that the indentations are
> actually called for. They seem to be Pound's concession to the original
> typesetters, given the narrowness of the page he could reasonably expect a
> publisher to offer, a concession that he might not have made had the page
> widths been more ample. Inasmuch as the HTML "page" is like an opened book
> that has no binding crease, HTML offers twice the page-width, in a manner
> of speaking. Under modern circumstances, Pound might like to see his lines
> unbroken on the virtual page.
>
> We took this subject up briefly a few months ago, and I'd like to hear more
> from those who disagree with me on this.
>
> Tim Romano
>
> At 07:55 PM 9/23/01 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
> >I have a mouldy old website that I haven't maintained in years,
> >but it has a scrapbook thingie that rolls interesting
> >quotations and meta-quotations through once every week.  This
> >week there's a piece of Canto CV featuring a fairly aggressive
> >attempt to get the indentation right in HTML.  Go to
> >http://www.textuality.com/ and hit the "Worth reading" link.
> >  -Tim