[charleski]

Originally Posted by crutledge

This seems to be a related area to ask this question.

Is there a way (regex???) to captalize the first word of a paragraph?

This will be simple when Sigil implements the PCRE Regex engine.

Originally Posted by freewheeing

Well, I was fine with paragraphs spacing until you guys started talking about it. :-) Actually, I'm in academia and have always preferred a line to indents because it's easier to read and grade a hundred papers on a weekend that way. The indents throw me off.

Spaced paragraphs are entirely correct for technical works, and are definitely superior for works where the text is interspersed with a lot of equations or figures, which cause the text to be spaced out anyway and each paragraph represents a single, clearly-defined message. You read a paragraph, digest what it's said, then move on to the next. Since the standards used on the web were designed by people coming from a technical background, this method became the default.

Narrative text, on the other hand works differently. The 'sense' of the text isn't partitioned off so neatly in individual paragraphs, but flows between them, and paragraphs often merely represent differing aspects of the same underlying sequence. Think of a conversation, for instance: the individual paragraphs only make sense when read in context with the surrounding text. Using indents rather than vertical space respects this and helps the reader digest the text as a coherent sequence rather than as a set of packaged ideas.

Narrative text does use paragraph spacing at a scene break, where the author wants to convey the sense that this is now a new narrative sequence.