Install

pip install mdx_poetic

Usage

import markdown
from mdx_poetic import PoeticExtension

md = """
This is just some normal text that is prose. It might have some _markdown_.

```poem

    this is a
    line of a poem

    and this is _another_
    stanza of a poem that has a really long line which will wrap
    and more **markdown** in it

```

And then this is some **more** markdown that follows.
"""

print(markdown.markdown(md, extensions=[PoeticExtension()]))

Running that will give you an output like this:

<p>This is just some normal text that is prose. It might have some <em>markdown</em>.</p>
<p><blockquote class="mdx-poem"><p class="mdx-peom--stanza">
<span class="mdx-poem--line">this is a<br></span>
<span class="mdx-poem--line">line of a poem<br></span>
</p><p class="mdx-poem--stanza">
<span class="mdx-poem--line">and this is <em>another</em><br></span>
<span class="mdx-poem--line">stanza of a poem that has a really long line which will wrap<br></span>
<span class="mdx-poem--line">and more <strong>markdown</strong> in it<br></span>
</p></blockquote></p>
<p>And then this is some <strong>more</strong> markdown that follows.</p>

But that won't be too useful without the help of some CSS:

.mdx-poem {
  margin-top: 1rem;
}

.mdx-poem--stanza {
  margin-top: 1rem;
}

.mdx-poem .mdx-poem--line {
  margin: 0 0 0 40px;
  text-indent: -20px;
  padding: 0;
  display: block;
}

This will give you a nice clean result where <blockquote class="mdx-poem"> will be indented slightly, you get a line in between stanzas, and any wrapped lines will be indented under the beginning of the line:

Using <blockquote> and <p> tags with <span><br></span> was chosen intentionally to properly format in console RSS readers like newsboat. Further testing might be necessary for visual compatibility with other readers as well the above is most accurate syntactically to the intended output.

Developent

For pushlishing to PyPi:

python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
twine upload dist/*