I’ve been enjoying multimarkdown of late. That is, using it in a very basic way to produce nice latex to produce nice output. But I don’t understand any of it.
I don’t suppose there is an easy way of indicating verses, is there?
The quotation (i.e. “>” followed by the quote followed by a blank line) is so easy.
There’s nothing equivalent for verses, is there?
I had to go through the LaTeX document and replace the \begin{quote} with \begin{verse}.
All in all that’s not even a bad solution, but one you have to make edits in the LaTeX, things get a little more cumbersome than I’d want.
{incidentally, I’ve seen something on the forum about this question, but it seemed too complicated for my poor, technically challenged head}
The best way to do poetry in MMD is to use one of the stylesheets that are set up for it, which will convert “code blocks” into poetic blocks. All of this is pretty easy to do, and will result in poetry that looks good in Scrivener as well as in the final copy.
In your project’s MultiMarkdown settings (File menu), add a new entry with the [b]+[/b] button.
For the new “Key”, copy and paste this into it: [b]LaTeX XSLT[/b]
Now in the big content area to the right, paste this: [b]memoir-poetry.xslt[/b]
That’s it, now standard MMD code blocks can be used to write poetry. In case you don’t know, these are created by putting a tab in front of every line. The tab will be ignored in LaTeX, it’s just the syntax for making a code block. After you’ve pressed tab, everything you put on that line will be interpreted “verbatim”. This means you can do creative line indenting and so forth, if that’s your cup of tea.
I find it easiest to make large code blocks in other programs that have an “indent” option. I’ll write the bit that needs to be a code block in Scrivener, and then copy and paste it into a text editor like Text Wrangler, select the text, indent it all at once, and then paste it back into Scrivener. This avoids having to hit tab over and over for long passages.
Incidentally, that thread you came across was probably really old, and the reason that memoir-poetry and 6x9-poetry were created in the first place.