Possible to remove indents?

[neonbible]

The ebook im working on has the first word of each paragraph indented. Is there a quick and easy way to remove the indent?

Or in Calibre?

[Danger]

How are the paragraphs indented?

Look for some css that has, text-indent: #;

Removing that (or setting # to 0) will remove your indents.

If that isn't there, look for any &nbps; which should appear right after every <p> tag. This is a stupid way of doing indents and very rarely used but you just never know. &nbsp; stands for non-breaking space

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by neonbible

The ebook im working on has the first word of each paragraph indented. Is there a quick and easy way to remove the indent?

Or in Calibre?

I just want you to know that the way you are going about it will look poor. You'll have to then have a line space between each paragraph since you won't have indents. It's going to look bad and give the reader a really poor reading experience.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I just want you to know that the way you are going about it will look poor. You'll have to then have a line space between each paragraph since you won't have indents. It's going to look bad and give the reader a really poor reading experience.

my 2 cents: I agree

Indent or increase the inter-Paragraph spacing to make up for the visual run-together. I add an additional .35 em to (the bottom) of my standard 1em (.5T,.5B) margin. NB I add to the bottom so as to not mess the heading to first para spacing.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I just want you to know that the way you are going about it will look poor. You'll have to then have a line space between each paragraph since you won't have indents. It's going to look bad and give the reader a really poor reading experience.

a question of taste, I'd say -
when reading on a small e-reader screen, indents can be waste of space. it does not bug me at all to read a book with no indents!

calibre has an adjustable indent size setting which it can apply when converting

[neonbible]

You were right, it does look a bit odd without. At least it does when there isn't a blank space between each paragraph. I did employ Danger's solution for modifying the CSS and setting the text-indent to 0. Tried it but decided to put the indent back in via Calibre's conversion to a smaller indent of 1em.

The main problem is just with block quotes where there shouldn't be any indents.

[Danger]

Originally Posted by neonbible

You were right, it does look a bit odd without. At least it does when there isn't a blank space between each paragraph. I did employ Danger's solution for modifying the CSS and setting the text-indent to 0. Tried it but decided to put the indent back in via Calibre's conversion to a smaller indent of 1em.

The main problem is just with block quotes where there shouldn't be any indents.

All my paragraphs are set to indent 1em but for those special blocks of text that shouldn't have an indent I use a separate css class that overrides the text-indent of the paragraph.

example css:
p { text-indent: 1em; text-align: justify;}

.no-indent { text-indent: 0; }

example html:
<p>this paragraph is indented..... blah blah more text etc....</p>

<p class="no-indent">This paragraph is special and requires no indenting.</p>

Actually I usually add a margin of 1em to the right & left, as well, to offset that special paragraph. So instead of the first line being indented, that whole block is offset by 1em instead.

.no-indent { text-indent: 0; margin: 0 1em 0 1em; }

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by theducks

NB I add to the bottom so as to not mess the heading to first para spacing.

It would only mess it if you had define that spacing as smaller than the normal paragraph to paragraph spacing. In other words, vertical margins in HTML are not additive, they are "minimal" spacing instead (often, at least).

If you define "h1{margin-bottom:20pt}" and "p{margin-top:10pt}", the spacing between consecutive <h1> and <p> will not be 30pt (the sum ofthe two), but 20pt (which "includes" the 10pt of the <p>).

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by neonbible

You were right, it does look a bit odd without. At least it does when there isn't a blank space between each paragraph. I did employ Danger's solution for modifying the CSS and setting the text-indent to 0. Tried it but decided to put the indent back in via Calibre's conversion to a smaller indent of 1em.

The main problem is just with block quotes where there shouldn't be any indents.

Block quotes have their own CSS entry. You can fix it there.

Dale

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cybmole

a question of taste, I'd say -
when reading on a small e-reader screen, indents can be waste of space. it does not bug me at all to read a book with no indents!

calibre has an adjustable indent size setting which it can apply when converting

If an indent is a waste of space, what do you call a full line of blank space that's not a section break?

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If an indent is a waste of space, what do you call a full line of blank space that's not a section break?

i'd call that an end of paragraph! this post e.g. currently consists of 4 paragraphs ( including the quote) and would be harder to read without the blank lines, but it has no indents!

if a book has too much space for my tastes I either tweak the css or use find + replace all to take out empty line coding

it is also possible to run the book through calibre & tick "the remove blank lines" options in conversion parameters. Do an epub to epub conversion, but make a backup beforehand!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i'd call that an end of paragraph! this post e.g. currently consists of 4 paragraphs ( including the quote) and would be harder to read without the blank lines, but it has no indents!

if a book has too much space for my tastes I either tweak the css or use find + replace all to take out empty line coding

it is also possible to run the book through calibre & tick "the remove blank lines" options in conversion parameters. Do an epub to epub conversion, but make a backup beforehand!

Now take a look at this...

....i'd call that an end of paragraph! this post e.g. currently consists of 4 paragraphs ( including the quote) and would be harder to read without the blank lines, but it has no indents!
....if a book has too much space for my tastes I either tweak the css or use find + replace all to take out empty line coding
....it is also possible to run the book through calibre & tick "the remove blank lines" options in conversion parameters. Do an epub to epub conversion, but make a backup beforehand!

Notice how that takes less space on your screen? Well, it also looks better too.

[cybmole]

personal taste rules I guess , but I have gotten to like the combo of no indents + empty lines between - it looks neater to my eyes without the ragged left hand edge that occurs with a lot of short, dialogue style paragraphs.
it is a simple flip from my settings to yours or vice versa - just tick/ untick the "remove lines betewen paragraphs "option in calibre & set your preferred indent value

I don't think there is any great consistency in how printed novels present; if I had a bunch to hand I'd do a quick survey across a mix of authors & publishers, but I've pretty much abandoned paper novels in favor of electronic, now.

I can examine some of my kindle purchases though ...

hmmm - well thats 3 -0 to you. 3 of 3 books checked use indents + have no blank lines. indent settings vary though e.g. one book indents by about 2 letters, another indents by 4 letters.

I think I determined one time that that equates to setting 1 em or 2 em in the calibre indent field ?, and was told elsewhere that Kindle cannot do settings like 0.5 or 1.5 but will round up. so if you want a 3 letter indent you are out of luck.

Now for a random check of web news story formatting - I try various on line newspapers & look at how they format their stories & see no indents + blank lines betweeen !

i guess I've become accustomed to that presentation style & now like having my e-books laid out like my e-news

if this forum allowed polls we could run an opinion survey...

that's enough research for me, for a Sunday morning, but I guess it would be possible to track down Amazon's own formatting guidelines for wannabee Kindle authors and relate those to Calibre settings

PS I note that as I types this I instinctively used no indents & used blank lines between sentences. Maybe because it's just easier that way on a web form.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Notice how that takes less space on your screen? Well, it also looks better too.

The first is objective and observable, the second is entirely subjective and a matter of personal preference.

It's true that the convention in book formatting is to indent the first line of a paragraph (except when it's the first paragraph following a chapter or section heading) and have no space between paragraphs. But that's just a convention - something which most likely came into being through a desire on the part of publishers and printers to minimise the number of pages required to print a book and as a result minimise the cost of printing a book. We've all simply become used to it when reading printed books. I respect the fact that you think it looks better like that, but I don't agree that that automatically means it look better to everyone.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by cybmole

...I guess it would be possible to track down Amazon's own formatting guidelines for wannabee Kindle authors and relate those to Calibre settings...

Actually, Amazon doesn't provide any - leaves it entirely up to the author to decide how they want to format their books. It results in many posts to the Amazon Kindle publishing forums asking how books should be formatted, from prospective authors feeling unsure about what is "best".

Having said that, however, if you submit essentially unformatted HTML via the KDP interface, or email it to your Kindle for automatic conversion, Amazon's system will default to formatting it with a paragraph first line indent and no space between paragraphs.