Topic: Including an original poem in a greetings card
Also, I don't know whether you would want to do this, but you could if you wish produce a greetings card with the poem on the front, and instead of the greeting inside, your name and the date, then send it to yourself.
Here is a link to the template.
https://www.papier.com/portrait-photo-315
The purchaser replaces the image with an image of his or her choice.
The purchaser changes the greeting inside to his or her choice. Various fonts are available. For one card I got twenty-one lines of text in Garamond instead of the greeting, namely sixteen lines of a poem, and a description and my name and the month and year, together with space after the poem and before the description.Here is the website.
One needs to register to order a card, but it is free and I have made aroud a dozen cards there and sent them to myself and framed them with frames from Tesco delivered with my grocery orders.
The cards are £3.50 plus 85p postage.
Nicely printed and a matt finish, so less than twice what a non-customised card of similar quality would cost in the shops.
One needs to send a jpg file.
I worked in pixels at 2171 pixels high by 1571 pixels wide at 300 dots per inch; that gives a bit of sideways play.
The size is, mixed units, 7 inches tall by 5 inches wide, with a 3 millimetre wide bleed area on each edge, though only three of them get chopped off.
Best to leave a bit of white background space above the text, which I prefer to be typeset in a text frame, not as artistic text, and a bigger bit of white background space below the text.
The image could just be of text, or there could be coloured decoration too.
The poem is, including blank lines between verses, twenty-four lines.
So with space above and below, twenty-four lines needs to fit into about five inches vertically.
So what point size?
Electronic type size tends to be meaured as height above the base line rather than overall height as is done with metal type printing.
So some trying out needed.
But needing about five lines per inch, so maybe fourteen point or perhaps twelve point.
Which font? Upright or italic, or a script font?
Well, that is an author's choice and depending also what the author has available or could have available after a free download from Google fonts.
So no suggestion from me so as not to influence the author's choice.
William
― Tennessee Williams