I’m dealing with the following formatting problem. I want to remove all first-line indents in every document (chapters, end matter, everything). I selected the option to remove all first-line indents in the compile menu. When I compile as an epub, it all looks right except in one end matter document, called “Discover Other Titles”.
The problem document is one of two documents that have the same section type, and the other one has first-line indents removed the way they’re supposed to be. As far as I can tell, the only thing I’ve done differently in the problem document is that I used the ruler in the editor to create hanging indents. As I look at the text in the inspector, there is no first-line indent, but it appears when I compile as an epub. In compile, under section layouts, I selected “text and notes use editor formatting”.
Can I keep the hanging indents but not have a first-line indent? How?
No, I wasn’t able to find a fix. Here are my two screenshots. The first, “Discover Other Titles by Annie Douglass Lima” is the document with the problem. The second, “About the Author”, is fine. Thanks for being willing to take a look!
Most obvious thing between those two screenshots is that the ruer settings are not identical. There is a difference between ▼ and ︎ with ▼ being the indent of non-first lines. You are seeing what you setup here.
Thank you for posting those screenshots. That’s helpful.
The issue I’m encountering when testing this with the Tutorial is that the hanging indents are not consistently rendered in each of the ePub tools I’m using to review the output.
That is, Kindle Previewer 3 might show them working correctly, but Calibre’s “ebook-edit.app” shows them formatted differently. The same with Sigil and Apple Books.
And, that’s going to be a fundamental problem with using hanging indents like this.
Each user’s ereader could display the text in a much different layout, depending on the font and font size they’re using.
When I change those settings in my different tools, I’ll get some text that’s not marked with the hanging indent doing other funky stuff on the screen. (“Funky stuff” being the technical term…)
This might be a situation when omitting the hanging indents is the better choice. That way, each ereader program or device has a better chance of displaying the material in a way that’s easier for the reader to see.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Don’t the ︎s represent tab stops? (Which I don’t need and didn’t deliberately put into the document, but I didn’t think they were affecting anything.) How do they relate to hanging indents and whether the first line in the document is indented?
︎ does indeed represent a tab stop but ▼ (as in your first screen shot) is an indent. You could drag the indent back to the start of the ruler. (Personally I prefer to use the menu Fonts > Paragraph > Tabs and Indents item as it is more precise.)
As to where these came from, did you prehaps import a Word document?
︎ with ▼ being the indent of non-first lines. You are seeing what you setup here.