How to Have No First Line Indent for Kindle eBooks

I hear this very often on Kindle formatting forums:

"I have no indents in my book, but when I publish it on Kindle there are indents on the first lines of every paragraph. Why are they there? How do I get rid of them?"

This most often happens when you format your book using Word (or any other word processor).

The sad truth is that if you set your first line indent to 0in in Word, you will get indents in your final Kindle book.

It seems that when you set the indent to 0 in Word, it doesn't actually set it to 0in, it set it to 'none'. What's the difference, isn't that the same thing? Well, in html (which is what all eBooks are based on) there is a difference.

If there are "no" first line indents:
What it Means: This means there is no mention of text-indent in the html.
The Result: The default indent of the device or program is used, for Kindle the default is a slight indent.

If first line indents are set to "0":
What it Means: "text-indent: 0" will be added to the style of the paragraph.
The Result: No indent.

So, what do you do if you want no indent?

In Word you can set the first line indent to a very small number (0.01in for example). This will set a very small indent (so that it won't go to default) and visibly it's not very different from 0in.

This could also happen if you edit your book as html or an ePub. In this case, the default indent can occur if you have no "text-indent" style for your paragraphs. To fix this simple add in "text-indent: 0".

How to Identify and Remove Tabs

There are a few thing that many authors do to try to make their work look nice, but ends up causing problems. One of those things is using the tab key to indent. This works fine for word processing files. It would also be okay if you plan on creating a PDF of your book. However, this does not work out if you plan on created an ePub or mobi eBook.

The tab key is evil! Do not use the tab key to indent your text!

How do you know if this is how your paragraphs are indented? The easiest way is to turn on the show/hide non-printing characters.
On the tool bar of your chosen word processing program there will be a symbol.

Here it is in Microsoft Word:

You can now see all the non-printing characters like spaces, paragraphs, and tabs. Here's an example:

Do you see those little arrows at the beginning of each paragraph? Those are the tabs.

Here is it in Open Office: 

And here's what you will see:

And finally it's a little different in Apple's Pages. In Pages it's called Show/Hide Invisibles and you have to access it through the menu:

And here's how things look in Pages:

So, what's the problem?

There are no devices or formats that I know of that support tabs. There are a few things that could happen to your tabs depending on what converter or format you use. In most cases they will simply disappear. The converter program/format/reader doesn't know what to do with tabs so they ignore them. In some instances I've seen tabs turn into spaces. Which, again, isn't ideal.

Oh no! I have tabs? What do I do?

So, you've written your book, but you used tabs instead of paragraph styling. You don't want to go back through the whole document and remove the tabs one at a time. That would be far too time consuming. Luckily there is a way to use each program's 'find/replace' feature to remove all the tabs from your document.

Here's the process for Microsoft Word:
Go to the 'Edit' menu, then 'Find', then 'Advanced Find and Replace'
 

Go to 'Replace' and note the small downward pointing arrow in the bottom left corner.
You can either type in "^t" in the find field (without the quotes). Or you can click that small arrow to bring up more options. From there select the drop down menu that says 'Special', then select 'Tab Character'.
 

 
Leave the 'Replace' field empty and hit 'Replace All'. Now all your tabs should be gone!

Here's the process for Open Office:
Go to the 'Edit' menu, and select 'Find & Replace'.
 

 
Now select the 'More Options' button in the lower left corner.
 

 
Make sure that 'Regular expressions' is checked. In the 'Search for' field enter "\t" (without the quotes) and leave the 'Replace with' field blank.
 

 
Now hit 'Replace All' and all your tabs should now be gone.

Finally, here's the process in Pages:
Go to the 'Edit' menu, select 'Find', then select 'Find'.
 

 
Go to 'Advanced'. Beside the 'Find' field there is a drop down menu that says 'Insert', click that and select 'Tab'.
 

 
A tab character is inserted into the 'Find' field, leave the 'Replace' field blank. Now hit 'Replace All' and all your tabs should disappear!

But I still want my text indented! What should I do?

Use paragraph styles! There are many different indent types that you can use. I find that a first line indent of between 0.2in - 0.33in looks best.

I will go through exactly how to add indents using paragraph styles with all three word processors (along with screencaps like I did in this post) in a future post.