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.
--
Yours cordially,
Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)