Is "white-space pre" usable? <pre> implies the use of an ugly courier-like fixed pitch "monospace" font. You don't want to get into the business of trying to set font-families IMHO because well frankly it will never work. Desktop machines can't even agree on fonts, and small machines have a less-than zero overlap in what they will accept for font-families. And even IE breaks horrible on something as simple as "monospace" So, I think people at DP/PG have pretty much universally stayed away from setting font-families, which leaves <pre> tied to monospace, which, no, is not usable for poetry, unless the poetry is about 1970s teletype machines, or something -- see #24353 Even the simplest attempts to set font-family on the Klassic Kindles fails spectacular.