"space between paragraphs using same style" disappears on reflowable epub

[Man Myth Legend]

This is a bit maddening, I'm publishing a book of poetry and just need spaced between the sections. Spaces between paragraphs is not an abstract function of written text but seems to be incredibly complex to accomplish. Orignally I just hit retun to show a space, as I do in word processing doc. Those spaces disappeared when I saved to epub. After digging I found that I needed to use paragraph styles above and below, did that and those spaces also disappeared. Then I found someone suggesting I use forced line breaks and that worked! Then someone else said that's bad form, and that I should use paragrpah styles. I discovered there's paragraph style "space between paragraphs using same style"...that's what I need! Applied it...disappeared. I've spent hours trying to get spaces between my paragraphs, please can someone tell me what I'm missing? Is there some setting I need to click to preserve paragraph style spacing in epub?

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

@Man Myth Legend, you're working across several different publishing technologies and some things are the same across them, others aren't.

EPUB is a form of HTML and is thus required to follow some principles, two of which you're running into:

• No double hard returns are allowed between paragraphs, and
• "Space between paragraphs using same style is reduced to just one" is not in HTML. This feature is only available in 2 programs that I know of: Adobe InDesign and MS Word, but it's not in HTML/EPUB.

If you were exporting to a PDF, your spacing would be retained. But because you're exporting to EPUB, that InDesign feature is stripped out.

There are many features in InDesign that don't carry over into EPUB, as many of us have discovered over the years. @James Gifford—NitroPress suggestion for multiple paragraph styles is your best solution for your book.

And all formatting should be with done with paragraph and character styles in order to create a more compliant EPUB when exported.