[Tex2002ans]

Hey begtognen. Welcome to MobileRead.

Originally Posted by begtognen

I'm in the process of converting my DOCX file into an ebook.

[...]

Now, though, all of my blank lines that are meant to be there (like between two scenes) are gone.

What you want is called a "scenebreak".

These are gaps or symbols after the previous scene ended and the new one begins.

- - -

Personally, I'd STRONGLY:

• recommend using centered asterisks (or some other symbol)
• be AGAINST using just "a gap" / "blank lines"

especially in the case of ebooks.

YES to asterisks/symbols:

   And then he got shot.

            * * *

Diane woke up in bed the next day.

NO to simple gap + noindent:

   And then he got shot.


Diane woke up in bed the next day.

I explained all the pros/cons + exact reasoning how/why in this 2019 thread:

• 2019: "Why is it so hard to preserve blank lines?"

Originally Posted by begtognen

(I don't know another way to get the indents to work, as I'm using LibreOffice Writer, not Word, and haven't been able to find the styles info that's available for Word about alternative indents for LibreOffice Writer.)

LibreOffice? Fantastic!

I've written over a thousand step-by-step LibreOffice tutorials and posts within the past 2 years.

How to Create Scenebreaks Using Styles

I strongly suggest creating 2 simple Styles:

• scenebreak
  
  • = centered + have a gap above/below.
    
  • Apply this to your asterisks/symbols.
    
• first
  
  • = no indent.
    
  • Apply this to the very first line of your chapters/scenes.
    

Then you just mark all your Styles:

    Chapter 1: The Beginning        <---- "Heading 2" Style

It was a dark and stormy night. All <---- "first" Style
was quiet in the western front.
    This was the tale of intrigue   <---- "Text Body" Style
and espionage.

           * * *                    <---- "scenebreak" Style

Tommy woke up in a cold sweat.      <---- "first" Style

Bing, bang, boom. Problem solved. This will transfer over nicely from LibreOffice into your ebook.

I wrote about this exact thing way back in:

• 2020: "eBook Formatting in Sigil"

Since then, I went on a complete streak over on the LibreOffice subreddit:

• /r/LibreOffice: "Has anyone written a book using LibreOffice?"

If you need more, I strongly recommend typing this in your favorite search engine:

• Styles Tex2002ans site:reddit.com/r/LibreOffice
• scenebreaks Tex2002ans site:mobileread.com

That'll lead you to hundreds and hundreds of posts where I/we covered this topic in detail over the years.

- - -

Side Note: And, make sure you're on the latest LibreOffice 7.6.

They added this really fantastic "Styles Highlighter" feature called "Spotlight":



You get to it by:

• View > Styles (F11)
• Alllll the way in the bottom right, you should see a little checkbox called "Spotlight".

After turning it on, it numbers/colors all the Styles currently used in your document. This easily lets you see+tag+clean them up.

It was first described back in 2019 in this blog post:

• LibreOffice Design Team Blog: "Proposal to conveniently highlight and inspect styles in LibreOffice Writer"

and finally made it into LibreOffice in 2023.

- - -

Originally Posted by begtognen

I do have the paragraph styles set correctly in Writer [...] but the indent didn't appear in the converted Calibre ebook [...]

You may also be interested in my comment from 2022:

• /r/LibreOffice: "Seeking advice on exporting .odt file to epub"

Good idea going from LibreOffice into a temporary DOCX, then converting that to EPUB.

The ODT->EPUB tools, sadly, aren't as clean as the DOCX->EPUB tools, so a lot of stuff like Styles get broken in the conversion.

But, if you designed your original document super cleanly with Styles, so much of that stuff should transfer over to ebook. Then, you just need to understand the basics of HTML+CSS in order to tweak your EPUB code slightly.

For example, if you marked all your "first" paragraphs + "scenebreaks", then it would be as simple as going into the HTML and seeing this:

<h2>Chapter 1: The Beginning</h2>

<p class="first">It was a dark and stormy night. All was quiet in the western front.</p>

<p>This was the tale of intrigue and espionage.</p>

<p class="scenebreak">* * *</p>

<p class="first">Tommy woke up in a cold sweat.</p>

and tweaking your CSS:

p.first {
  text-indent: 0;
}

p.scenebreak {
  margin-top: 1em;
  margin-below: 1em;
  text-align: center;
  text-indent: 0;
}