Quote:
Originally Posted by Buckaroo
I haven't read the entire 250-page thread, so this has almost certainly been brought up before, but just in case: There is a spot in Hell reserved for whoever decided that it is now an acceptable formatting convention to denote paragraph breaks with an empty line space rather than with an indent. I never, ever saw this before my reading became primarily e-books. Sure, I can change it in Calibre, but not without the risk of damaging other formatting within the book - i.e. section breaks that *also* use blank lines. And in any case, I shouldn't *have* to.
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That's been an argument in typography for a lot of years. I find either one acceptable as long as the usage is consisten. I prefer the indent to indicate a new paragraph on ebooks I personally format. I dislike the books where you get both an indent and a blank line and I reach near hatred for those books where both are used but inconsistently.
Various style guides will give you different information and even disagreement on the size of the indent. One of my niblings is currently working on a doctoral thesis and the university specifies a blank line as a paragraph separator.
One place where you will often deal with blank lines is on web pages where adding a blank line is much easier than modifying the CSS.