Figured out a way around the problems I was having with the limited form sizes truncating the MT entries into WIST.
I can save each letter’s entries as an HTML-tag-embedded text file (which I already have), FTP those up to the site (minor annoyance), then do a #INCLUDE from the respective quotes.
And, yes, it works like a champ.
A few drawbacks. I can’t use the Smartypants plugin to give me curly-quotes and em-dashes (trivial). I need to revisit my line breaks so that poetry, etc., goes over properly (should be relatively easy as part of the Word pre-processing, but I’ve learned not to anticipate that any more). And I have to change the files to a .shtml extension, which is relatively easy to do (a single time) in MT, but means previous Googled stuff will be SOL (which isn’t all that big a deal).
Sweet.
Okay, so another drawback is that the built-in MT search won’t work, because it’s an SSI, so there’s nothing in the database to search. Darn.
Ah, well — I can just continue the Atomz search.