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yerkanian
yerkanian
Inspiring
February 14, 2024
Question

Indesign Reflowable Epub - paragraph spacing issue

  • February 14, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 551 views

Hi everyone. I know this question might have been discussed before, but I haven't found any solution. 


I'm exporting a reflowable epub book and have spacing between paragraphs, which works perfectly in Mac's iBook reader (I use ^S for all paragraph breaks). Still, when I review the epub with Kindle Previewer the spacing disappears. 

I know this can be solved with CSS editing, but is there any other option to correct this in Indesign?

Thanks in advance. 

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    1 reply

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    February 14, 2024

    Spacing in EPUB exports is largely simple if not trivial; ID translates most paragraph and object spacing to some reasonable equivalent in all but a few special cases. CSS is only needed for a little final tweaking if the conversion amounts are not (esthetically) ideal, or to remap styles to allow dual-format publication (with optimized PDF and EPUB output).

     

    And the one permanent caveat is that no two EPUB readers render content in exactly the same way, so a page optimized for one reader may be slightly different or a complete mess on any other reader. Apple's reader is good but not completely standard; I recommend optimizing for it only for upload/sale via iTunes and not as a general model. (And with a list of known differences, Kindle Previewer tends to follow standard EPUB rules, but it's again a case where a book should be optimized for KDP, which won't be optimal for most readers.)

     

    But you have to use standard structural rules, no matter what. I confess that I don't know what a ^S represents and I can't find it in any of the InDesign wildcard lists, but it's not a standard hard paragraph return (^p) and therefore it's the wrong break to use for EPUB export. There are many ways to break a line (in ID and other tools) and all of them work to some degree in doing a page layout intended for print (and 99%, to PDF)... but any electronic export needs very specific breaks for paragraph management, and all forms of soft return, line return, soft break etc. are somewhere between 'to be avoided' and 'will not work.'

     

    Use hard paragraph breaks and paragraph styles to get your text formatted for EPUB. Nothing else; no tricks or workarounds or techniques that might work on-screen or in-print. No "soft" line or paragraph returns at all.

    yerkanian
    yerkanianAuthor
    Inspiring
    February 14, 2024

    Hi James, 

    Thank you for your response. 
    ^S represents Nonbreaking space, which helped me solve the issue of paragraph spacing, or any other places, where I need to create a distance between texts for aesthetic reasons ( like poem verses, copyright page, etc.) in Apple's reader, but unfortunately, it doesn't work for the Kindle, where all my text collapse into each other. 

    Neither hard paragraph break nor paragraph style with indents after the end of the paragraph worked for me, I tried different settings, but nothing worked 😞 

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    February 14, 2024

    Oh, okay — I knew it was familiar but didn't look under "spaces." (And several searches failed to turn it up, and most Adobe help pages do not list these codes — I sympathize with novices trying to figure this stuff out!)

     

    EPUB is fundamentally HTML. If something won't work in HTML (+CSS), it won't work in EPUB. The only way to get paragraphs is to use a hard return/end of paragraph element.

     

    And even if something can be made to work in HTML, it's not always a good idea. Soft returns can be exported to EPUB, but it's generally a poor practice in layout, both for print and for export.

     

    The solution for situations like this is always — always — definition of proper paragraph styles, and as many of them as needed. Workarounds, generally, aren't consistent or even functional.

     

    It's not uncommon for unusual text layouts, like poetry, to need a dozen "body" Paragraph Styles to represent a particular look/break pattern and conform to this technical/method requirement. Keeping them in carefully managed hierarchies helps.

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