Quote:
Originally Posted by dickloraine
99% of my hundreds of print books indent normal paragraphs and don't do this for scene breaks and the beginning of a chapter.
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I hereby challenge your 99%. The very first mass market paper-pack I grabbed off of my shelf at random indents all first paragraphs: first chapter para and first para after breaks (mostly block-quotes). In fact, now that I look at it. I find the indent to be rather tiny and insufficient for my preferences if I read it today. I don't remember having any hangups/concerns/complaints about its clearly aberrant typography when I read it years ago. Not because it was different from the mostly imaginary "standard" of print book typography, but because it simply didn't
matter.
EDIT: Third book indents after scene-breaks but doesn't indent opening chapter paragraphs.
EDIT2: fifth book I grabbed had ridiculously large line-spacing (I don't remember it tripping me up at the time).
EDIT3: sixth book used images for some scene-breaks in the middle of a page (no indent) and some breaks had no image (also in the middle of the page). No indication that one break was "harder" than any other from the context.
EDIT4: seventh book has a huuuuge indent for the first paragraph in every chapter; a "normal" indent for subsequent paragraphs.
... and another that indents every single paragraph no matter where it occurs.
The books I pointed out were copyrighted 1972 - 1998; published by DelRey, Bantam, Tor, etc...
I came across one book where the justification created rivers of whitespace between words that would make the world's-worst non-hyphenating ebook rendering system's justification algorithm look fantastic by comparison.
Typos; missing text; words that should be italicized, but aren't; block-quotes that are indistinguishable from normal text ...
these are mistakes that can (and
should) be pointed at as "wrong" or a "mistake." Paragraph indents (or non-), scene-break handling, line-spacing, margins (esp new-chapter margin-top), fonts--these are things that have never been standardized in print ... no matter how hard someone wants to believe they were. Variations and personal preferences have always held sway in those areas.