I cannot for the life of me get linebreaks in an epub

[#1]

HELP! (sorry for bad english)
So i have been trying to export my indesign file to an epub reflowable, and it removes all blank spaces, line breaks and blank lines. I have looked up how to fix it and found a place that told me to use a paragraph style that had "space after" the places where i needed it.. so i did that... and it didnt work.. any other helpful tips? Im not good with indesign, i do not know ANYTHING about HTML or CSS so i feel very very lost. 

[#2]

Creating Reflowable ePubs is not intuative. I suggest you take a LinkedinLearning online video course on creating Reflowable ePubs. They are in English but there is transcript. You can get 30-day free access.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/me

[#3]

If you truly know nothing about HTML or CSS you're in over your head.

What version of InDesign are you using?

[#4]

I have some basic knowledge of CSS and HTML. Where can I find the CSS files for the style in InDesign?

I'm using version 15.0.2 on 64x

[#5]

HTML collapses white space—multiple returns and spaces get collapsed into a single space or return:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/web-programming-with/9781284091809/xhtml/11_Chapter02_08.xhtml

[#6]

You need to make sure everything has a paragraph style properly assigned and pay attention to what Rob already posted. If you're trying to force things with multiple line breaks, etc, stop doing that...it's futile.

I also would not overthink this. Reflowable epub is highly dependent on the settings that the reader would set in his or her own device with their own preferences for fonts, font sizes, etc.

[#7]

You can open the epub contents by changing the .epub extension to .zip and use a utility like Stuffit Expander to open the zip archive:

[#8]

If you're on a Mac BBEdit is an excellent application for editing ePubs.

But you need to understand some concepts, such as no page size, no page numbers, no Master pages, all text to be styled (paragraph and character styles), all images to be anchored. You will be very lost until you get some training.

[#9]

told me to use a paragraph style that had "space after" the places where i needed it.. so i did that... and it didnt work.. any other helpful tips?

Also, space after should work, but the epub’s relative space amount will be different. It will be defined as a margin-below in device pixels, while InDesign’s space below is the print output dimensions. Here I set a space below as 150 pixels which equals 2.083" when printed. You can also see the tabs and multiple returns are collapsed:

[#10]

Bear in mind that when you choose to make a reflowable publication you are giving up full control. You are letting the viewing software make its layout decisions for you, and these decisions will be very different on diffferent device and apps. Some may squash your content or spread it very much, so blank lines will be sacrificed. Don’t worry! Your job is to deliver what matters: the content. 

If you can explain why, in a particular case, you feel you must break the reflow with extra blanks, new lines, or blank lines, someone may have a solution, or can tell you you cannot control it. Screen shots may help. 

[#11 · Accepted solution]

I made it work. 😄 

But im setting up a book for an author and he finds it very important that there is a line break between the chapter titles and the text. The other authors i have worked with didnt think it was important so i have never had to deal with it before. But now i found a solution that works thanks to people in here and other forums. 🙂 

[#12]

How did you make it work? I'm having the same issue.