Consider the following code:
\documentclass{book}
\textwidth 5.75in
\usepackage{verse}
\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\LARGE
\vskip 25pt
\begin{center}
\textbf{Casey at the Bat}
\end{center}
\vspace*{5pt}
%\addtolength{\leftmargini}{60pt}
\begin{center}
\begin{verse}
Oh, somewhere in this favoured land \\
the sun is shining bright, \\
The band is playing somewhere, \\
and somewhere hearts are light;
\vskip 10pt
And somewhere men are laughing, \\
and somewhere children shout, \\
But there is no joy in Mudville--- \\
mighty Casey has struck out.
\end{verse}
\end{center}
\end{document}
which produces
As you can see, despite the \begin{center} \end{center}
I've used, the stanzas of verse are not centered.
I know that I can approximate what I want if I uncomment the command %\addtolength{\leftmargini}{60pt}
and then visually adjust the amount until I get something which looks acceptable; however, I would like to do this automatically such as one would do to center a minipage or a tikzpicture.
QUESTION: Is there a way to center stanzas of verse in a reasonably simple and automatic way? If so, how may I do this this?
Thank you.
Best Answer
You asked,
If the verse package is loaded, the
verse
environment takes an optional argument, which informs LaTeX about the average length of a stanza which, in turn, influences the horizontal positioning of the stanzas. The argument should be a length variable or macro; theverse
package provides a macro called\versewidth
for this purpose. This mechanism should be used in conjunction with acenter
environment. (Aside: If you want to allow page breaks inside theverse
environment, you should use\centering
, not\begin{center}...\end{center}
.)Your query further asked if there's an automatic way to center the stanzas horizontally. The
\versewidth
mechanism is not fully automatic; however, I believe that's quite alright and not a shortcoming at all, as what you should really want to achieve -- typographically speaking -- is "optical" rather than "mathematical" centering. Whether a bunch of stanzas "looks centered" depends on several factors, and not just on the widest or average length of the stanzas in the verse. In the following example, after some trial runs, I chose the length of the second-longest stanzas as the basis for\versewidth
. Your aesthetic preferences may well differ from mine.The framelines in the following screenshot are drawn by the showframe package.