I am wondering if someone can explain to me why, when I try to compile my book, the compilation works fine except every first line of every chapter is indented, even though these lines in Scrivener are not indented. Interestingly, the first line of the first chapter is not indented, but the compile function indents every first line of every chapter after that.
Is there some way to fix this, or is this a bug? I’ve also noticed that randomly every few chapters a particular line of a paragraph will be indented much further than I indented it when writing. I am not sure if this is a connected or separate problem.
It’s a bit hard to say without more detail on what it is you are doing, and what settings you are using in conjunction with them. What is, for example, a “chapter” in your project? Is it a text entry in the binder? A folder with a dozen items within it? A line of text in a file with a special heading font?
Well at any rate, if you are going to the trouble of formatting your text right in the editor, might it be easier to use less of an overhaul for your compile settings? Maybe just pass the majority of the text straight through with a very simple Layout. By default Scrivener presumes the role of handling formatting for you, that way you don’t have to bother with details like indents while in the flow of writing—but if you intend to, that kind of stuff can get in the way. The “Default” compile format is a pretty basic starter that doesn’t do much outside of what you tell it to.
Well I can hazard a guess as to the odd double-indent problem: search for tabs (insert them with ⌥⇥ in the Find dialogue, and get rid of any that are being used to force an indent. Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Strip Leading Tabs can help here).
I tried the stripping suggestion and it removed the indents from about the first five paragraphs of every chapter (which are just text entries in a binder), so I corrected everything but the first paragraph, tried to compile… and it still didn’t work. However, from your suggestion I was able to track down the actual problem, which was that I had the compile settings set to remove the indent of the first paragraph of every chapter, and since I had already done that as I wrote, it was actually adding the indent back in when it compiled. I removed that setting, and it worked!
I should add, it worked only for .mobi and pdf formats. The problem is sill there for Word, and it also changing the line spacing randomly in Word although it doesn’t in mobi and pdf. I don’t know why that is, but for now I’m happy with the pdf and mobi formats as that allows me to email the docs to my reviewers.