_Krishna:_ Some damsel I saw, supremely fair--
A moon unstained, that slowly rose,
Or a golden vine.
Eyes twin lotus-blooms, dyed with sūrm,
The playground of waves of love--
Twin timid partridges, snared by Nature
With nought but a rope of collyrium!
A garland of ivory-pearls caressed the burden
Of her mountain breasts--
Kāma pouring celestial streams from a brimming conch
On a golden Shambhu!
The sacrificer of a hundred offerings on a sacred shore
Were blest by such reward!
_Vidyāpati says: It is Gokula's lord._
_The herd-girls' darling._
On the Kindle I formatted it like this:
_Krishna:_
Some damsel I saw, supremely fair--
A moon unstained, that slowly rose,
Or a golden vine.
Eyes twin lotus-blooms, dyed with sūrm,
The playground of waves of love--
Twin timid partridges, snared by Nature
With nought but a rope of collyrium!
A garland of ivory-pearls caressed the burden
Of her mountain breasts--
Kāma pouring celestial streams from a brimming conch
On a golden Shambhu!
The sacrificer of a hundred offerings on a sacred shore
Were blest by such reward!
_Vidyāpati says: It is Gokula's lord._
_The herd-girls' darling._
I will know to avoid <span> in my web pages in the future, and to put in the special style that prevents kindlegen from indenting the first line of every paragraph, etc. I am gradually learning the tricks. However, the reformatting is not something I could have done without having two different HTML versions, and the Kindle really needed it.
I also made a nice cover image for the book and split the chapters into separate files in the EPUB and the MOBI I generated from it. So
archive.org has a nice Kindle version, and the Kindle Store, but PG (which has by far the most downloads) has a disappointing one and the Kindle Store will have two disappointing ones competing with my good one: one by Amazon and another by some reprobate who seems to make a quick and dirty version of everything released by PG before Amazon makes their free version.
Most PG books look fine on the Kindle, but some do not. Another issue I had with "Ancient Manners" was I put in the captions to the illustrations as text. When you publish the MOBI without illustrations (as Amazon does) the captions are undifferentiated text smack in the middle of regular text, making reading confusing. Now I made the captions centered and italicized, but somehow by the time they got to the Kindle Store in their free version that was lost. The reprobate's version was even worse.
So it would be nice to have the option of preparing a hand formatted version for EPUB and MOBI so when Kindle owners grab them the results are as good as possible.
James Simmons