Hi, Scrivener community.
I’d like all of the chapters in my book to start with body text flush left. But two of my chapters open with dates (styled as “opening date”), before the start of the body text. And a third starts with both a date and and an image. When I compile, the three chapters with opening dates indent the first line of the body text, rather than set it flush left, no doubt because Scrivener is reading the date lines as the “first line.”
I have the Settings pane set to “Remove from first line and after empty lines” but that doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.
Any ideas for possible workarounds?
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.
Jackie
v
Hi.
Your date seems to be of the same font and size as your body text.
Using a line break (again), you can make it be part of the same paragraph than what is actually your first paragraph.
In the editor, for those three chapters :
Date
–Line break (two or three)
First paragraph.
(I don’t see why you’d need a style for your date btw. I’d personally remove it. Especially if you plan on using the cheat I described above. – Unless it is a Character Attributes style, in which case it doesn’t matter.)
. . . . . . . . .
The reason it is not doing it after an empty line could very well be that empty lines can’t exist in an epub file. You’d have to add a non-break space to those empty lines for them to survive the conversion.
Whether that’s why it doesn’t work or not I can’t be sure, it would depend on the order in which this is treated vs when the conversion to html happens during the compile process.
(Also very possible that this wouldn’t work either : will those no longer empty lines be seen and treated as empty by the compiler ??)
Ah, the line break issue again. Thanks for the reminder, Vincent.
This has fixed the problem with two of my chapters.
The third, which has a date, then an image, then the body text, is a little trickier. Because I’d like the date and the body text flush left, but the image centered. Any thoughts on how to accomplish that?
Leave the date and the image as they are if they already come out fine in the result.
Create a paragraph formatting style for what is in reality your first paragraph, and set it to have no first line indent. (In reverse order, actually. Create the style from the needing paragraph once you’ve set it (if not already) to be without a first line indent in the editor.)
Uncheck the two font related settings from the style’s config panel.
Off the top of my head that’s all you have to do.
(You could have fixed the two other chapters this way too. Instead of using a line break. Both ways are just as good.)
1 Like
Thanks, Victor. Took some playing around (and some Gremlin zapping), but I finally got it to work, using your suggestions.
Thank you so much for all your help! I appreciate your patience and willingness to share your knowledge.
Regards,
Jackie
