You should now see your document with indents applied automatically. Click OK to go back to the previous dialogue then click OK again to return to your document. To set an indent, choose ‘First line’ in the special box and put a value in the ‘By’ box. On my version of Word, the original style for Normal was defined like this: Click ‘Normal’ in this pane to select it and then click the drop down arrow and select ‘Modify’. On the main menu go to Format > Styles to open a ‘Titles and Formatting’ task pane. The exact set of key clicks may depend on your version of Word – what follows is the way it works for me: The default style is ‘Normal’ and you’ll either need to modify this or create a new style of your own. To tell Word the way you’d like paragraphs to look, you have to set a style. Note that a line break (made with Shift + Enter) is quite different from a new paragraph even though the result might look the same in Word. There are a few other marks too but it’s the paragraphs that really matter. Now every space can be seen as light dot, every line break shows as ↵ and each paragraph ends with the ¶ mark. Lots of authors hate these, but if you’re trying to sort things out, they’re a huge help – and of course, you only need have them on for the duration of the exercise.Ĭlick the ¶ button (if this is not on your main toolbar, expose the formatting tool bar to see it). The first think to do is to turn on the formatting marks. To make your documents look the way you want in Word but, at the same time, make them convert nicely into HTML, you need to sort out the way you handle indents.
If this happens, o some or all of the indents you’ve put in by hand will still exist, but they may not be the size you expected and/or they may be added to other indents the ereader puts in. However, some conversion processes may try to compensate for this by adding non-breaking-spaces (spaces that are not ignored in HTML). In HTML, all white spaces, including indents made by multiple spaces or tabs, are collapsed to a single space so they disappear. Unfortunately this can cause problems when the file is converted to an ebook. The tempting way to put this right is to insert some spaces or tabs by hand so the Word document looks the way you want. Word marks a paragraph as a paragraph automatically at the moment that you press the ENTER key, but its default styling of paragraphs doesn’t provide an indent at the beginning. To help it do that, you need to mark those elements in your Word document. Instead of prescribing a fixed WYSIWYG layout, HTML marks each element of your document with its meaning (Heading, Subheading, Paragraph etc) and the device does its best to display it sensibly. To make it possible for ebooks to be used by devices with varying capabilities (including Braille and audio!), the underlying format for both epub and kindle ebooks is HTML – the same language used for web pages. This variability means you can’t fix what people will see in the same way that you can with print books so you have to accept that you have less control. That’s because people read ebooks on a range of different reading devices with different capabilities, and they choose to read them using different font sizes and different line spacing. but these WYSIWYG properties don’t translate properly into ebooks.
This is great if you are going to produce a printed book. Word is a WYSIWYG program (what you see is what you get) so your document looks the same when you print it out on paper as it does when you look at it on screen.
If you print out your Word document and everything looks OK, why do things get in a muddle when you turn it into an ebook? One of the most frequent questions we are asked by self-publishing authors concerns problems with paragraph indents.