Lineate — Poetry Blocks

Opis

The web has never known what to do with a poem.

For thirty years browsers have treated verse as prose with pretensions, or else as a picture of text. HTML collapses white space on principle. Indentation vanishes on publish. A long line, wrapping on a phone, breaks into two lines nobody wrote. The distances a poet opens inside a line — the pause, the held breath — flatten to a single space, when they survive at all.

Poets and their editors have met all this with duct tape: strings of  , periods dyed the color of the page, pre tags that set Keats in monospace, and, most often, screenshots — pictures of poems, unsearchable, silent to a screen reader, soft at the edges on the very phones where poetry is now mostly read. The Poetry Foundation, which publishes verse as carefully as anyone, still resorts to an image when a poem’s shape turns ambitious. Until now there has been no better way.

This is the better way.

What a poem requires

A poem is made of lines, and a line is a unit of sense. Where a line ends is not an accident. Nor is the pause inside it. Nor is the white space that holds one stanza off from the next. Each of these is a choice that conveys meaning. Print created conventions to carry this meaning by about 1501. The web never has.

Lineate treats the poem as a structure, not a string.

What Lineate does

• A line is a line. Enter makes the next one; Enter on an empty line closes the stanza. That is the whole tutorial.
• Indentation is real. Tab steps a line inward, Shift+Tab back, eight steps deep — and the steps are set in the poem’s own type, so the shape survives every theme, every font, every screen.
• A wrapped line confesses. When a long line must fold, its continuation hangs, indented, as print has done it for centuries. The reader always knows one line from two.
• The silences are kept. Tab in the middle of a line opens a caesura gap — the held space HTML has always swallowed. Click it to widen, narrow, or remove it.
• Paste does the decent thing. From Word, Docs, or plain text: line breaks become lines, blank lines become stanza breaks, leading tabs become indents, and the old   contrivances convert quietly to structure. A note reports what was done.
• Poems remain text. Selectable, searchable, translatable. Screen readers pause at line ends and take gaps as word breaks. No pictures of language.
• An image when you want one. One click sets the poem as a PNG — Instagram sizes or link preview — with the entire poem as its alt text, because accessibility is not a garnish.
• No JavaScript on your pages. The rendering is CSS entire. Nothing runs, nothing slows, nothing breaks.

Against the built-in Poetry block

WordPress ships a Poetry block. It is not a bad pre tag; it is only a pre tag. The differences are quickly told:

• Lines. The core block stores a poem as one run of text with breaks in it. Lineate stores lines and stanzas as blocks — real things you can select, move, and address.
• Indentation. Core: type spaces, count them, hope. Lineate: Tab and Shift+Tab, eight steps, set in the poem’s own type.
• Wrapping. Core: a folded line reads exactly like a written one, and on phones the poem is silently rewritten. Lineate: continuations hang, indented; a line survives its fold.
• Spacing within the line. Core: typewriter spaces, fixed in nobody’s font, fragile as frost. Lineate: a measured gap you can widen, narrow, or remove, scaling with the type around it.
• Type. Core: monospace unless the theme troubles itself to say otherwise, and half of them never do. Lineate: the theme’s own body type from the first keystroke.
• Accessibility. Core: one undifferentiated slab of preformatted text. Lineate: semantic lines and stanzas, pauses at line ends, gaps read as word breaks, and exported images carrying the whole poem as alt text.
• Leaving. The one respect in which the two blocks are equals: a click turns a Verse poem into a Lineate poem, and a click turns it back. Bring your old poems; they are not hostages either.

The problems, taken one at a time

Every one of these has stood between poetry and the web since the beginning. Every one of them ends here.

1. Collapsing white space. HTML treats a run of spaces as one space and a tab as a suggestion; the indents a poet types are destroyed on publish. Lineate stores indentation as structure, not spaces — there is nothing left for the parser to destroy. Solved.
2. The false line break. On a narrow screen a long line wraps, and the wrap is indistinguishable from a break the poet wrote. The phone rewrites the poem, and most readers now hold a phone. Lineate hangs every continuation with an indent, the centuries-old print convention, so a turned line can never impersonate a new one. Solved.
3. Typewriter type. Verse in a pre tag arrives in monospace, and a sonnet should not dress like a stack trace. Lineate sets poems in the theme’s own type. Solved.
4. Spacing built of glue. The workaround of record — chains of   — is measured in fixed units of nobody’s font. Change the theme, the font, or the screen, and the alignment shears apart. Lineate sets indents and gaps in the poem’s own em and ch; the shape scales with the type it belongs to. Solved.
5. Pictures of poems. When all else failed, poetry went online as screenshots: invisible to search, silent to screen readers, soft at every zoom. Lineate keeps the poem text — and when you want an image for the feeds, renders one properly, full poem in the alt. Solved.
6. The Word-file toll. Poems arrive from Word and Docs with their shapes held together by habit, and pasting one into a CMS has always cost an editor twenty minutes of repair. Lineate’s paste interpreter converts line breaks, blank lines, leading tabs, internal spacing, and the old   contrivances into structure, then reports what it did. Solved.
7. Punctuation improved without consent. WordPress smartens quotes and fuses hyphens wherever it finds them — a courtesy in prose, a corruption in verse. Lineate exempts the poem; the poet’s characters are published verbatim. Solved.

The smaller courtesies

Epigraphs, dedications, and attributions set as proper poem notes. Centering on the longest line, the way print does it. A scroll mode for long-lined poems that must not wrap at all. A phone-width preview inside the editor, so you see the fold before your readers do. And straight quotes stay straight, double hyphens stay double: WordPress does not “smarten” a poem’s punctuation while Lineate is watching.

Poems set in the theme’s own type — never monospace, unless you ask for it — and they are free to leave: one click returns any Lineate poem to plain Verse or paragraphs. It would be a poor tribute to poetry to hold it hostage.

Who made this

I am, regrettably, a poet, and for years I edited an online poetry journal called Linebreak. A decade of good poems arrived as Word attachments and left as compromises; every hack condemned above, I have committed personally. Lineate is the tool I needed then and could not find, because it did not exist.

Forgive my boasting, but this is the best way there has ever been to publish a poem on the web. The problem is as old as the browser, and it has simply never been solved before — not by the built-in block, not by the workarounds, not by the systems behind the handsomest poetry publications on the internet. Now it is solved, and the solution is free software — GPL, no premium tier, no locked features — because the shape of a poem must not be a luxury good.

Source Code & Bundled Libraries

The human-readable source of all compiled JavaScript and CSS ships inside the plugin: the src/ directory holds the original code and package.json the build configuration. To build: install a Node.js LTS release, then run npm install and npm run build from the plugin directory (the toolchain is the standard @wordpress/scripts).

Bundled third-party libraries (all GPL-compatible):

• html-to-image (MIT) — renders the poem-image export in your browser; nothing is sent to any server.
• @wordpress/icons (GPL-2.0-or-later) — toolbar icons.

Lineate makes no network requests of its own: no external services, no tracking, no phoning home.