Poetry formatter
Paste a poem or upload a file, and get PDF, EPUB and Word back with your line breaks and spacing kept exactly as you wrote them. Free to try; $5 to unlock a file.
Built to do less
Our other tools tidy whitespace, because in prose a doubled space is nearly always a slip and a line break is set by the page, not the writer. This one does the opposite, on purpose.
A stair-step indent, a gap held open mid-line, a stanza shaped on the page — those are the poem. So spacing is carried through as non-breaking characters that survive every conversion, nothing is justified or hyphenated, and no line is silently rewrapped.
What you get back
- Your spacing, verbatim — indents, interior gaps, and stanza breaks, in all three files.
- Ragged right, no hyphenation — justification would stretch the spaces you chose.
- Hanging indents on runovers, so a wrapped line never reads as a new one.
- Stanzas kept whole across a page break where they fit.
- PDF, EPUB and DOCX, with the EPUB validated before you download it.
Questions
- Will my indentation survive?
- Yes — that is the entire point of this tool. Leading indents, gaps held open inside a line, and blank lines between stanzas all come through exactly as you wrote them, in all three output formats.
- Why does other software break my line breaks?
- Because most formatting tools assume prose, where a run of spaces is a typo and a line break is arbitrary. They normalise both. In poetry those are decisions, so this tool switches that behaviour off rather than trying to be clever about it.
- Can I paste instead of uploading?
- Yes. A short poem is faster to paste than to save as a document first, and pasting skips document conversion altogether, so nothing can be lost in translation. You can also upload .docx or .txt.
- Is the text justified?
- No. Justification stretches the spaces between words, which would change spacing you chose deliberately. Poems are set ragged-right, unhyphenated. A line too long for the page wraps with a hanging indent so a runover reads as a runover, not as a new line.
- What do I get back?
- A PDF for submissions and print, an EPUB for a collection you intend to sell, and a Word file for an editor who asks for one. The EPUB is checked with EPUBCheck before you download it.
- Does this change my writing?
- No. Layout and punctuation style only — curly quotes, real em dashes. Your words, line breaks and spacing are never altered.
Writing prose instead? Try the manuscript formatter.