I’m having some trouble with getting text to align properly. The text looks fine in the Scrivener Editor, but appears out of alignment after compiling to epub. The attached image shows what I am trying to do versus the actual result. Any advice?
Note that I have special characters turned on in Scrivener Editor so that you can see where the tab and paragraph markers appear. Thx.
I’m surprised that the tabs work at all in an ebook reader, although not perfectly. 
This happens if Compile settings have paragraph hanging indents set to a different point margin than the tab setting. They seem to match in the Editor, but they don’t in Compile. So change them in Compile or better yet, don’t use tabs at all.
eBooks are a variant of html which doesn’t use tabs; it simply substitutes a single space, it seems. If you are using a monospaced font, you can use non-breaking spaces to line things up. Otherwise, for what you seem to be wanting to do, your best bet is to use tables with no lines.
Thanks drmajorbob. When I go to Compile > project format > Edit > Section Layouts, I do not seem to be able to alter the tab settings on that screen. To alter the tab settings, do I need to create a Style within Compile?
Hi xiamenese. You’ve piqued my interested. I’ve been using tabs in Scrivener for about 5 years now. The compiled epub books look fine on Kindle readers and when viewed on the Apple Books app. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but where is it that tab-formatted text does not work well?
First off, I have never compiled to ePub myself, but I work with HTML a lot, including Scrivener → MD → HTML workflow, and in any text I have used, the Tab is replaced by a space, as in your example, and as ePub is a flavour of HTML, I am not surprised by your example.
What does surprise me is that you have previously had tabs working on Kindle and Apple Books. So, I’ve done some quick research that took me to this page:
which explains ways of sorting it out. I can only imagine that previously your compiled output included one of the methods explained there, but why this one doesn’t follow suit is well beyond my pay grade.
Mark
