That's a good point. How about a much cleaner syntax that can be used to generate the OCR markup? With your example text: {{ocr line| The first experiments were made on the absorption of carbonic }} {{ocr line| acid gas by water: and here a singular disagreement was observed }} {{ocr line| in the first trials made under exactly the same circumstances. It }}
This is much easier to read, you know where the line breaks go, and it's immediately clear even to someone stumbling across the text that we're specifically keeping track of lines (so they don't helpfully remove unneeded line breaks). Since single line breaks are ignored by MediaWiki, we can just use the same line width so the template syntax lines up for easier ignoring.