For poets and zine makers

You already know the specific way this goes wrong. You paste a poem into a publishing tool, and it comes out justified to both margins, with a first-line indent it invented, and the stanza breaks turned into whatever the paragraph spacing happens to be. The tool thinks a line of verse is a short paragraph. It isn’t.

Foliant has a verse format, and it exists because that was broken here too and someone went and fixed it rather than writing a workaround into the FAQ.

What the verse format actually does

There’s a button in the editor. Turn it on for a poem and, for those lines only:

• The line ends where you ended it. No justification stretching the words to reach the right margin.
• No paragraph indent. A stanza is a stanza, not a run of indented paragraphs.
• Blank lines hold their height, so the gap between stanzas is the gap you typed.
• No drop cap. A book opens a chapter with a large initial; on a poem it swallowed the first word and shoved the second line sideways. A poem that opens a section doesn’t get one.
• Spacing tightens between lines and loosens between the poem and the prose around it, which is what the eye expects and what nobody notices until it’s wrong.

It’s a real format, not a bit of styling you reapply each time: save, close, come back next week, and the poem is still a poem rather than having quietly reverted to prose on the way through the editor. That last part is the one this was actually tested against.

If your poems live in FB2

Import an .fb2 and its <poem> markup comes through as verse — the same format the button applies, so an imported collection can be edited afterwards without losing its shape. That matters if you’ve been keeping work in FB2 for years, which a lot of Russian-language poets have. .docx, .epub and .txt come in too; there you mark the verse yourself, which for one collection is a few minutes.

If the layout is the poem

Concrete poetry, a hand-set zine, anything where the position on the page is the work — none of the above helps you, because reflowing text is exactly what you don’t want. Lay it out wherever you lay it out, export a PDF, and drop that in: each page becomes a page, rendered in your own browser, with the spread intact.

The trade is honest and worth knowing before you start: the text becomes a picture, so it can’t be selected, searched, or resized by the reader. For a visual zine that’s the correct answer. For a collection meant to be read, use the verse format instead.

Why bother putting it here at all

• It looks like a book. Cover, paper, a page that turns — which for a form people mostly meet as a wall of text in a scrolling feed is not decoration, it’s the difference between reading and skimming.
• The reader picks the typeface and size from a set that includes Literata, Lora, PT Serif and Atkinson Hyperlegible. You control the layout of the line; they control what’s comfortable to their eyes.
• One address for the whole shelf. Everything you publish sits at /your-name, and readers can subscribe there — the next collection reaches them by email without you keeping a list.
• A reader who finishes can write to you. Not a comment section: a letter, to you, that lands in your cabinet. For poetry, which mostly gets published into silence, this is the part people are surprised by.
• It embeds. Paste one snippet and the book turns pages inside your own site or a post.

All of it free while we’re building Foliant, no card, and there will always be a free tier. Up to five books on the shelf, 200 sections in each. Public books carry a small “Powered by Foliant” badge, and there is currently no setting that removes it.

What it won’t do

• Sell the collection. There’s no checkout. The sale stays wherever you already sell.
• Let you choose the reader’s font or size. Deliberately: those belong to whoever is reading. You get the line breaks, the stanza shape, the alignment and the sequence — the typographic decisions that are actually the poem’s.
• Set type in two columns, or hang a line in the margin. The page is a single column. If you need that, it’s the PDF path.