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 Keep Images and Captions Together in eBooks

I've come across this question a lot. How do I keep the captions below my images (or tables, figures, etc)?

As you know, eBooks don't have set 'pages', the text flows. The user can change the font, the size, and the margins of the text. So, what happens when your image is at the bottom of the screen and there's no room below it? Well, the caption is pushed to the top of the next screen. Many people don't like this, and I understand. The caption is supposed to stay with the image, that's why it's there.

The sad conclusion I've come to (after much research and experimenting) is that there is no easy way to keep the two together that will work on all devices or programs.

The first thing I tried was the html property "page-break: avoid".

You may use it in this manner:
<div style="page-break-inside: avoid">
<img src="../Images/example.jpg">
<p>This is the caption below the image</p>
</div>

This should cause those items within the "div" to not break across pages. Therefore the image and caption should stay together.

Note that I said should. I tried this method, and I found that whether it works or not depends on the device/program you use. Some would honor it, others wouldn't. Sadly, Amazon/Kindle does not honor this code.

At the time I was trying to code a Kindle book, so it was on to something else. I went to Amazon's website and found what html/css codes they support. If you're curious you can check it out here:
Supported HTML in eBooks in General
Supported HTML/CSS in KF8 eBooks

I found the codes "figure" and "figcaption" in the KF8 supported html. I thought maybe that would keep the two elements together. Unfortunately, in my tests it did not. I even tried combining the 'figure/figcaption' with the 'page-break-inside: avoid'. But, it still didn't work.

So in the end, the only method I've found that works right now (this may change in the future) is to place the caption within the image file.

To do this, open your image in some image editing program. GIMP is free and available for multiple operating systems. Add a little white space under your image and use the text tool to type in your caption.

One thing to keep in mind while using this method is that the text is now part of the image, which means the text will scale with the image. When your image appears very small (think about reading on an iPhone screen) the text will be very small as well. There's not much you can do about this. Try to make the text large enough to read on the majority of screens.

The good news it that this method will work on all devices/programs.

Using the 'title' Attribute with Chapter Titles

It's simple to set up your chapters to appear as you want them to in the Table of Contents (ToC) when they're a single line of text. Something like; Chapter One. But what if you want something more than that?

If you have a simple single line chapter title, all you need to do is format the line as a heading. In a word processor you would use one of the heading styles. If you're using html you would use h1, h2, h3, etc tags.

In this post I'm going to tell you how to have chapter titles that span multiple lines and chapter titles that are images. We're going to accomplish this by using the "title" attribute. To do this you'll need to be working with html. I don't know how to do this in the various word processors, and I'm not sure it's even possible. If anyone knows if it is possible please let me know.

If your chapter title is on separate lines, simply styling both lines as headings can cause problems. If your chapters are titled like this:

Chapter One

The Beginning

If you mark both lines as h1 they will both appear in the ToC as separate entries like in the image below.

If you decide to only use the h1 tag on the first line, then the second part "The Beginning" will not appear at all.

There are two ways to set this up so that it looks nice in the book and appears as you want in your ToC. One method is to use the h1 tag on the first line, and the p tag on the second line. Then use styling to make them look the same. The other method is to use the br tag. This will create a line break but will not start a new paragraph. The h1 tag wraps around both lines.

<h1 class="chaptertitle">Chapter One</h1>
<p class="chaptertitle">The Beginning</p>

or

<h1 class="chaptertitle">Chapter One<br />
The Beginning</h1>

Now you want your chapter titles to appear correctly in your ToC. If you add the "title" attribute within the h1 tag, it will be used instead of any text between the tags. Here's how it would look:

<h1 title="Chapter One - The Beginning" class="chaptertitle">Chapter One<br />
The Beginning</h1>

This will appear in the ToC as "Chapter One - The Beginning" like in the image below:

Now, what if you want to use an image as your chapter title? That brings a slightly different problem. You can use the h1 tag around the image to try to make it appear in the ToC. The problem is, since there's no text, the entry will appear blank. You can see that here:

But, if you use the "title" attribute, like in the two line chapter title, you can fix this. So, your code would look like this:

<h1 title="Chapter One" class="chaptertitle"><img src=".../Image/chap1.jpg" /></h1>

Now, Chapter One will appear in your ToC like this:

This can also be used if, for some reason, you want the text that appears on the page of your book to be different than the text that appears in the ToC.

(note: I used the h1 tag through my explanation, but this will work for all levels of headings: h1, h2, h3, h4, and h5)

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.