Hi, this may be a dumb question but… I can’t figure out how to preserve my indents when applying a style to them. Currently, the indent information is just deleted and the text is taken all the way to the left. Can this be avoided?
Thanks!
Styles, excepting character styles, are by definition a full set of formatting attributes applied to the text. You cannot exclude some aspects of them from what they apply. So the answer is to put the desired indent settings into the style. The text then needn’t be indented by hand to begin with.
§15.6.3, Using and Managing Styles, in the user manual PDF, is where you will find everything you need to know about creating, modifying and applying styles to text. Scroll down to Redefining a Style in that section, to find information on how to update the styles you current have in your project.
I have the same question. I read the relevant section of the user manual, but I don’t see an answer to this issue. I’ve created a style to apply to the last paragraph of a scene, so there will be “space after”, the equivalent of skipping a line before the next scene. I highlighted an indented paragraph before a scene break where I had previously applied "paragraph spacing after 11 points in the line and paragraph spacing menu), clicked on “new style from selection”, and chose “save paragraph style”. When I compile to epub, there is a blank line after the paragraph the way I want, but the indent is gone. What am I missing?
If I wanted a blank line after the last paragraph, I’d hit return. Doesn’t that suffice?
Nope. It doesn’t.
You’d need a non-break space on that line for an ereader not to ditch it.
You should try and compile without the style, so to make sure that the extra line comes from it, and not from your section layout.
If the space is still there without the style, then it means that your style is not actually responding. (Which lines up with the disappearing indent.)
One possibility is that the name you gave your style is wrong. Do not use special characters, spaces or punctuation. ( _ is fine. Use that instead of a space if needed.)
You can rename a style for the output here:
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If you want to see what is going on at the other end, use Sigil.
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Also make sure that it is not the ereader that you are testing with that is removing the indents. (Say all of them are actually gone.)
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Make sure the second option is unchecked:
I think that second option (the first of the “Remove first line indents:”) could cause this.
This one: 
, but I am not 100% sure.
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For what it’s worth, the way you plan on inserting a blank line after your paragraph is the proper way to do it. (You could – all things relative – do it differently given that it is the last of a section, but still, yes, that’s one proper way to achieve what you want.)
I tried that, and it worked! With no style but “paragraph spacing after 11 points”, it turned out exactly the way I want, indent and all. (I wish I’d tried that before I spent over three hours trying other things!) I don’t know why I thought I remembered that didn’t work originally, so that I had to create a style in the first place.
Incidentally, I also tried your suggestion about keeping the style and unchecking “remove first line indents from all paragraphs following other elements”. The result was that the paragraph WAS indented, but the font size was different than the paragraphs around it. This remained true both with the original style name that had spaces in it, and when I renamed it without the spaces.
So, I don’t know why my style won’t work, but I’m happy that I have a solution that doesn’t require a style. Thank you for your help!
Can I ask: what are you wanting to do with the style(s). If you are wanting to create Body/Normal style, don’t; Scrivener’s No Style becomes Body/Normal on compile. If you are creating other styles like Block Quote, and you want it to use the same font and size as No Style, click the drop-down to make sure the style is saving paragraph formatting only and make sure Include Font and Include Font Size are unticked. Also remember to check the drop-down at the bottom for Next Paragraph.
I’m not at my computer at the moment so I may have got the wordings slightly wrong.
HTH.
Mark
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