Paragraph Indents Don't Work in Body Text

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’ve decided to try Scrivener to format some ebooks (Kindle) and am having a formatting issue. Previously, I’ve formatted all my ebooks in InDesign, using styles for each formatting component, (i.e. titles, subtitles, body text, etc.). InDesign allows me to specify a paragraph indent for body text which is added to the code for the

body text tag when the program spits out the .mobi.

In Scrivener, however, the body text option from the drop down styles menu in the Headliner bar doesn’t have an indent. I’ve tried selecting my paragraphs and then using the Indents and Tabs feature from the Formatting menu to specify an indent, but nothing happens, even though the Indents dialog box shows a number for first line indent.

I would just forget about using the default paragraph styles and hand format everything myself, but I’m worried that my choices won’t be reflected in the .mobi, or the coding will be erratic without a defined body text tag.

2

My only real issues with Scrivener:

  1. Styles aren’t styles - they’re merely a convenience function to format text while editing; and,
  2. The lack of header/footer styles for things like lines above/below and/or logos.

Have you tried the “preserve formatting” option? It’s a bit of a pain in that if you need to change format later, you have to trawl through the document looking for formatted sections and re-apply the new style, but it does work. I use this for figure numbering/naming and the output works for me … now just need to work out how to get styles supported in RTF for shudder Word and InDesign!

I’ve heard rumours that styles are due for an overhaul in the next release, but don’t quote me on that!