Re: indd > epub all line breaks (carriage returns) removed

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.