I have sections of a document in which I need to preserve white space. Section 15.5.6 Preserve Formatting of the Scrivener for macOS manual states that “In most cases it will be easier and better to use styles for this purpose, which have a built-in capability of preserving their formatting (Section 15.6)…”
However, I can’t find anything in Section 15.6 (or anywhere else in the manual, for that matter) about preserving white space. I am aware of the Format > Preserve Formatting command but I have already applied a certain style to all of the sections in which I need to preserve white space. So how do I preserve white space for that style?
P.S. If an answer to this is in another thread, please point me to it. I searched but couldn’t find one.
In some cases, I have multiple columns of information, which I admittedly could do via a table ( although I just used tabs and/or spaces when originally creating the information in the Scrivener editor). In other cases, I have multiple rows of characters (letters or numbers) and I’m trying to maintain the alignment between rows. Picture a first row that is full of characters but a second row with just a few characters that need to line up with certain characters in the first row. I used spaces to do so in the editor, which translated fine to print (at least using the compile format that I’m using), but all of the extra white space got eliminated when compiling as ePub. For example, below I’d want the numbers in the second row to line up with the zeroes in the first row (yes, I’m using a fixed-width font). Thanks!
For an ePub, pretty much the only way to do this is to use a table or an image. EPubs are HTML documents and don’t guarantee that they’ll protect white space.
You can use a style to define the relative indent for each line, but that won’t give you guaranteed results because the reader software allows the user to change the font and font size.
If you’re willing to use Markdown, you can pass raw HTML commands through to the output document.