Chapter openings and white space

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 12, 2019
2 replies
1256 views

Hello!

I am sure this is a common questions but I haven't been able to find a thread in the forums about it.

What is the proper way to create white space at the top of the page for a chapter opening? I can just customize that page by dragging down the text box or creating a frame inset, but wouldn't be nicer to have it built into the paragraph style so that it can flow into any page? I hear that multiple paragraph breaks are not recognized by E-Readers.

Thanks for your insights.

white space above header

This topic has been closed for replies.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi @35626004 ,

I said: "… You could add an anchored frame with fill color [Paper] to the chapter head to obscure the running head."

That was advice for producing PDFs for print or PDFs for online viewing.

Not for EPUB export…

And yes, it's a "dirty" trick.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

The question, here and in nearly everything I bring to publication, is how to efficiently straddle the two media, without having two completely different source files. It can be done, fairly easily with some practice and knowledge. The "white flag" trick is a good one for print, but it blows up on EPUB export unless you take a step to null it out. (I'd also suspect it's hell on accessability.) But it's not necessarily an either-or trick. Works across the spectrum if you know how to guide the export.

(Specifically, I'd assign the 'white flag' frame an object style, more to tag it than anything else, and then use CSS code to 'display:none' that object type.)

A

Anonymous

This problem could be solved easily in CSS with a next-sibling combinator. In the example I attached, with the correct export names, this would give:

p:first-of-type { margin-top: 40%; }
#ChapterNumber + p:first-of-type { margin-top: 20%; }

If it were possible to apply styles conditionally in ID, then we could probably have a single source file. This is not the case, and given this gap, perhaps it is better to have two files.

ExtendScript could partly fill this gap: using a script to prepare the ground for an EPUB version in order to anticipate the cancellations you are talking about, considering that deleting an element is better than making it invisible afterwards.