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cybmole · 02-13-2011, 02:41 AM

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.

02-13-2011, 02:41 AM	#13
cybmole Wizard Posts: 3,720 Karma: 1759970 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: none	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. Last edited by cybmole; 02-13-2011 at 02:57 AM.