Using paragraph rule for chapter headings

[Summayah5FC7]

Theres a trick to make chapter heading where you make a paragraph rule with an offset of, say, 150. You then tick keep in frame. This pushed the heading down.

Would this cause issues when exporting to epub?

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Yes. It doesn't work.

To include top-spacing (from the page's top margin) in EPUB and Kindle, you have to use a variety of spacing techniques in combination. Any one of them tends to work in any single destination, but if you want that top spacing in print, in most EPUB readers and in Kindle, it's best to use all three methods.

• The only way to get top spacing in InDesign, for print or PDF, as you've discovered, is the goofy workaround using a top rule. (Adobe really needs to fix this and have, say, a "honor top spacing" check box for the simple and frequent need to space chapter headings and the like a consistent way down a page. /editorial mode off )
• InDesign does not export the CSS factor <padding> at all, which limits the ability to have top spacing in EPUB.
• InDesign does export top spacing, at the ratio of one point to one effective pixel. Most e-book readers use an effective resolution of 144ppi, so the ratio is about 2:1 — 72 points or one inch in ID will result in about a half inch of screen spacing. However, not all EPUB readers honor top spacing at the start of a new virtual page. (Reflowable EPUB has no pages — it has one page that is paginated by the rules and settings of the reader. Whether page breaks and spacing are honored by the reader is somewhat variable.)
• EPUB and Kindle are also a bit variable about honoring page breaks so that, say, a chapter heading breaks to a new virtual page AND has top spacing.

So to get a completely conventional chapter heading into an EPUB or Kindle document —

• Use the top-rule method for spacing in the ID layout and print, and assign a page break to the style as well.
• Set the top spacing for the style to what you want it to be in the e-book, following the 72-point-to-one-half-inch rule. It will be ignored by InDesign in the source layout.
• Add a <padding> factor of the same value to the style in CSS, at the time of export, and reinforce the page break statements —

p.ChapterHead {
padding-top: 144px;
page-break-before: always;
page-break-after: avoid;
}

• Use the EXACT name of your paragraph style for 'ChapterHead.' Capitalization must match; use a dash for any spaces.
• Put this in a plain-text file (using Notepad or equivalent). Name it MYDOC.css or similar and put it in the doc folder. Add it to the list of additional CSS in the EPUB export menu.

And finally, as a suspenders-and-belt-and-safety pins backup, define your ChapterHead style as a 'split' style. Under the Paragraph Style menu, in the Export Tagging pane, check the "split document" box. Then, in the export menu, check "Split document" and select "based on paragraph styles" below. (This will force the export process to create a new content file beginning with each chapter heading, which is one more way to force readers to honor a space-above setting.)

Yes, this is a fussy and complicated process just to get some completely ordinary spacing above a title. But both ID and EPUB fight back on the request. There is more detail and explanation in the book noted in my sig. Happy to answer further questions as well.

[Summayah5FC7]

Thanks. It's probably less hassle to just have a reflowable epub without spaces before the headings.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

No, no, although I went on at length to outline the whole problem and its solution, the only step that's not dead simple is creating that CSS file. And that's a one-time thing unless you choose to tinker with the spacing.

There is another technique for spacing over headings, so that they behave in EPUB/Kindle the way they do in print and layout — spacing down when preceded by text, and collapsing to page top when they start a page. But that process is more involved. Just spacing down chapter headings is... easy enough, and esthetically advantageous.

It's all a matter of making best use of each medium... but not throwing centuries of accumulated book design out the window.