I’ve manually eliminated the indent of the first paragraph (Clicked beginning of the paragraph, slid the little thingy to Zero) of each chapter; File > Save; File > Compile > Save & Close; File > Compile… and all that jazz.
Open the .mobi file in the Kindle Previewer and lo, the indent has been replaced. Is there a way to format the little darlins so that the indent will be eliminated in the first paragraph of each chapter in the compiled file?
You’ve altered your documents, but the formatting applied by the compiler is overwriting what you’re doing. I’m a fan of putting in my own tabs, so in the compiler settings, Formatting page, I selected documents of Level 2+ (so, at least beneath the chapter level) and in there I adjusted the ruler similarly to what you did for your first paragraph. For this to work though, you have to then do all the indentation yourself.
If you are doing the indents yourself after tweaking level 2+ to display no indent, it would seem that you are doing the same thing I did, altering your document. Am I missing something (which is often the case, I might add)?
I should have included this, my intention is to wind up with .mobi or epub files. While I understand that doing what I wish to do would be easy if starting with an HTML file, I’ve not fooled with the stuff for a long time, and I only knew a mouse-full of HTML. And it was a small mouse, at that. Thus, Scrivener.
I found another post suggesting that if one were to check the checkbox in the Meta-Data sector of the Inspector panel the outcome that I desired, no indent on first chapter-paragraph, could be achieved.
Yup. Made such changes as were needed, checked the ‘Compile As-Is’ checkbox, saved compile, compiled, and the .mobi file is as I desired.
I know the Windows version hasn’t got all the features of the Mac version, but still it might be worth a try to look for this (which is how it looks on a Mac):
In Compile, in the Formatting pane, there is a tick box “Override text and notes formatting”. If you tick that you can set up all the formatting in the compile stage (provided you didn’t tick the “As is” box in the Contents pane) and override the formatting you have while writing.
To the right of that tick box there is a button named “Options”. If you click on that it opens a dialogue with “Layout options” at the top. There you have the tick box “Remove first paragraph indents” and if you tick it you get three more choices: On new pages only, At the start of each new document, after empty line and centered text.
If you tick “On new pages only” I think you get no indent on forced new pages, i.e new chapters (if you have set only new chapters to start on new pages).
As I said at the top, this is what it looks like on a Mac and I have no idea if you have the same options in the Windows version.
I don’t see those features in the Windows version; Would have been nice, but as I understand it, the program was written for Mac initially. Somebody posted a work-around for my issue on a Windows computer so I’m good. Seems to have worked for me.
Thanks again Lunk, I appreciate the additional input. (I’m keeping an eye on this thing, see.)