indd > epub all line breaks (carriage returns) removed

[Dan Greyhound]

I'm having exactly the same problem. Did anyone find an answer?

[focksbot]

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If I want to change the leading throughout the book I'd have to change another paragraph style instead of just one.

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No, you don't. What you do instead is base one style on another, with the only change being Space After. When you update the parent style, both change. That's the beauty of styles.

But that's his point -- you would have to update the Space After on a second style every time you made a change to the first one. There's no sensible reason why you couldn't just have one style that inserted blank line using the same point size -- that's what happens when you use a Word Processor, and even on a webpage when <br/> is used for spacing inside a paragraph. 

[BobLevine]

Adobe's templates, unfortunately, are garbage. I know someone who contributed to that collection and the person was astonished when all of his carefully spec'ed styles were dumbed down for the least common denominator.

[Mike Witherell]

I have sampled many of the downloadable pre-designed layouts and none of them use styles and layers and master pages well.

[Rawikorn32068166fccn]

Experts here are so offensive huh? 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Sorry you feel that way; I can't find a false or misleading answer anywhere in this very long topic.

There are, if you prefer, e-publishing forums and blogs out there that begin with the absolute dictum that InDesign simply can't create EPUBs worth using. You may find their gurus, hawking the manual processes and outdated 'truths' they learned fifteen years ago, more to your liking.

[Rawikorn32068166fccn]

This is why you sound aggressive. You don't need to be sarcastic when talking to people all the time. I'm not tech savvy nor a super professional designer. I'm here just to find a way to do the job but still haven't got one. Maybe those blogs and gurus who could actually give me the tips that really work instead of bragging about how great Indesign is might be better. Indesign needs to balance between User experience and the end result for sure.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

No one here has been "aggressive" except in the second or third iteration of telling the OP and the others who are asking the same technical/structural/best practices facts. There are thousands of posts here where experts of absolutely the first rank very patiently work a novce or beginner through the steps they need to understand. None of us is here at gunpoint; we are volunteers and we're here because we actually like solving puzzles and setting newcomers on the right path to the goals they're trying to achieve with this monstrously complex app.

When an admitted novice obstinately argues and rejects solutions because they don't lead to the result they want, doing it the way they want to do it, it's difficult to keep patiently explaining the same point. When it gets to the point of said novices actually name-calling and hurling accusations that the experts here are being offensive or dismissive or "protecting" something... well. (You might note that nearly every expert here has at least one topic on which they will give Adobe hell for not fixing, or for doing badly with in the first place.)

This thread contains a vast amount of highly expert content on the subject issue, both factual/technical and from very experienced publication design judgment. If you came looking for a validation of an amateur or faulty or deprecated technique and didn't find it, there just might be a reason.

[focksbot]

"When an admitted novice obstinately argues and rejects solutions because they don't lead to the result they want, doing it the way they want to do it, it's difficult to keep patiently explaining the same point."

Sorry, but this *is* arrogant and aggressive. You haven't really offered a solution; what you've said amounts to "Just don't let this be a problem in the first place". It's been repeatedly pointed out to you that people are working with pre-existing content that is imported into InDesign with double-line breaks (because that's how line breaks conventionally work on every other Word Processor). Your 'solutions' assume users are instead writing text directly into InDesign. Why not just get off your high horse and admit that InDesign presently has a design flaw which means you have to use a hacky workaround if you want to turn manuscripts with double-carriage returns in them into .epub files? I can guarantee the problem itself isn't going to go away in a hundred years -- you're never going to get the general population (the ones who produce most of the work we have to typeset) to work with paragraph styles. Styles have to applied on top of imported content.

[BobLevine]

You're right about one thing...the problem isn't going away in a hundred years because the problem is users that refuse to spend five minutes learning how the application works and how to EPUB works.

If these folks decided to go into carpentry instead, I have no doubt they'd be missing fingers after one day on the job.

[focksbot]

" ... the problem isn't going away in a hundred years because the problem is users that refuse to spend five minutes learning how the application works and how to EPUB works."

They aren't using InDesign, Bob. They aren't in the business of making EPUB files. They're writers. They bash the stuff out and then pass it on to typesetters and publishers like me, who import their work into InDesign. Any chance this salient fact could sink in some time this century?

[BobLevine]

And you think it's any better for laying out a book or anything else? I've seen countless Word and InDesign files that are absolute crap because nobody wants to invest in education. If it's your job to make them work, then charge them appropriately.

Rule one in this business: Garbage in; Garbage out! That's the bottom line. InDesign is quite capable of exporting a workable EPUB but only if the file is properly formatted. We can go around and around on this and if you want to continue to bash InDesign (and just to be clear, I have plenty of complaints myself so I'm no apologist) but if the file is properly formatted you'll get a very decent EPUB out of it.

[Dan Greyhound]

But it used to work! Indesign used to respect double returns when converting to epub. Someone somewhere decided that it should now not work! What we are saying is that this makes no sense; it's not an improvement that helps most users, so why do it?

[BobLevine]

So, the fact that it was broken means it should never be fixed? 

[Dan Greyhound]

It wasn't broken; that's my point

[Willi Adelberger]

As double returns are a no go, only a terrible user error, a fix is not needed, only a user training. 

[BobLevine]

Yes, it was! Two returns are only acceptable with a typewriter, not in a page layout application or in HTML!

[dans33352417]

Says who? Why is it a problem, it's how most designers, writers, editors do it. It's only a problem if exporting to epub and only now a problem exporting to epub because some decided to make it a problem. And why are line breaks supported? Surely line breaks have even less place in a properly formatted document which is going to become a reflowable epub? It makes no sense.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If you don't understand the difference between writers/writing and design/ layout, then there's probably no explanation you will ever accept about this. 

But yes, there are those who long for the days when poets typed their work directly into Linotypes. It was so much easier for designers then!

And if any form at all of "no, sorry, you're still wrong" is "aggressive," well, y'know... grrrrrrr.

[dans33352417]

And if you don't understand that designers who actually work with writers want to minimalise the amount of time they spend formatting a document then you probably don't actually use InDesign to create books for people and so really shouldn't be commenting.

And you still haven't been able to explain the advantages of this supposed improvement.

[Willi Adelberger]

When you work with multiple returns you have add or remove them if you make changes in the text before and the automatic page break moves forward or backwards. This is a lot of additional work with any change you make. Additional it is a potential source for break errors if you are not aware that a change on aprevious page is causing this reflow. 
space before and after are omitted when a page break happens. 
it is not true that writer don't know it as this practice is the correct way to format text not only in InDesign, but also in Word, PageMaker, RagTime, Quark Xpress or FrameMaker. 

[dans33352417]

You have to go through the text page by page after changes anyway to check for widows and orphans or awkward footnote breaks.

[BobLevine]

I strongly suggest you educate yourself. You can thank me later.

I'm done debating this. Buy yourself a typewriter if you want to use two returns. And don't forget to hit two spaces after a period.

[focksbot]

You guys are honestly living on another planet. The practical reality is that all across the world, writers of poetry press return once for a line break, return twice for a stanza break. They do this because it's a much easier and more intuitive system than holding shift + return for a line break and pressing return for a stanza break. It doesn't require them to go on any training course. It's the same way you handle spacing in an email, or while using social media, in a simple text editor or coding platform. They also do it because sometimes, as a special effect, you might want to add even more space, in which case you can just press enter again. They compose in Word or Google Docs, and then they send these files to their editors and publishers, who import them into InDesign for typesetting ebooks.

My options as a typesetter are currently either (a) a hacky workaround, (b) lose all the stanza spacing in the document that's been sent to me, or (c) devote my life to somehow convincing all the world's writers to use a less intuitive approach to composition -- one which will require them to set up a new style if they ever want to use additional vertical spacing -- just so that a few guys in the Adobe fanbase don't have to admit that InDesign suffers from an easily fixable lack of basic functionality when it comes to producing .epub files.

I mean, obviously I've picked number (1) and am currently using the hacky workaround, but it's amazing that this conversation still mostly consists of people insisting that a majority of writers need to change the way they work to accommodate the removal of a feature in a piece of software.

[BobLevine]

A "feature" was not removed. 

And as already pointed out, nobody is talking about writers. We're talking about designers. Their job is to understand the tools and output. For EPUB that means at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS and for print the way ink is put on paper as well as different color model.

You obviously don't care about learning any of this and frankly, if I was looking for someone to do this work, you and those like you would never get the job.

[focksbot]

We are, in fact, talking about writers, because writers are the suppliers of the content we typeset. And if you, as a writer, were looking for someone to do this work, you definitely would pick me and people like me, because we're the ones who would take your work and typeset it without complaining, not hand it back to you and tell you that it's 'garbage' which hasn't been pre-formatted correctly.

I understand HTML and CSS very well. The problem -- as I have pointed out over and over and over -- is that the people sending me their manuscripts do not. It isn't their job. But I have to work with what I'm given, and what I'm given has a metric tonne of double-spacing in it. A feature that allowed me to work easily with that content was removed, and I now have to go through each manuscript applying a different sub-style to each last line before I export to .epub.

Bob, I know you desperately, desperately want the reality to be different, and to believe that I, a designer and typesetter, am typing text directly into InDesign without first setting up my styles, that I am literally hammering the enter key, but that is not the case and your responses are therefore very silly indeed.