Indentation

Indentation settings work at three levels: book-wide defaults, a left indent for a whole section’s elements, and per-paragraph overrides that can even hang the first line. Book-wide settings apply to chapter section types by default.

Book-Wide Settings

• Disable All Indentation. Removes automatic indentation from all chapter section types, in both EPUB and print. For the space between paragraphs (rather than the first-line indent), see Paragraph Spacing.
• Remove Indentation of First Paragraph. Removes the indent from the first paragraph after a heading. Turn this on when you use drop caps, since the drop cap already separates the opening.
• Indent Size. How far the first line of each paragraph is indented.

Indent One Paragraph (and Hanging Indents)

Select a paragraph and click the gear icon that appears at its top-right corner. Two rows in the menu override your book-wide indents for just that paragraph:

• Left Indent. Pushes the whole paragraph to the right, up to 100 px.
• First-Line Indent. Overrides the project’s first-line indent for this paragraph. Negative values pull the first line back out, never past the Left Indent. Set either value back to zero to return to your book-wide setting.

To make a hanging indent, combine the two: set a Left Indent, then a negative First-Line Indent of the same amount. The first line sits at the margin and every following line hangs inward, the classic look for bibliographies, glossaries, and scripture verse.

Note

The values are entered in pixels but stored relative to your body text size, so they scale cleanly across print and ebook. First-Line Indent isn’t available on a section’s opening paragraph (that one belongs to the book-wide Remove Indentation of First Paragraph setting and section settings).

Indent a Whole Section’s Elements

For a nonfiction look where subheadings sit left of inset running text, open the section’s Options menu, choose Customize Section Settings, and go to Text > Indentation:

• Indent All Paragraphs. Whether this section’s paragraphs get the standard first-line indent: Default, Enabled, or Disabled.
• Left Indent. Shifts content in this section to the right, up to 100 px. Next to it, the Elements to Indent picker chooses which kinds move; everything left unchecked stays flush left.

The picker offers Select: All / None, then Paragraphs, Images, Tables, Blockquotes, Bullet Lists, Ordered Lists, Callout Boxes, Grids, Columns, Text Conversations, and Ornamental Breaks, plus Subheadings checkboxes for H1 through H6. Leave the subheadings unchecked and check everything else to get the classic inset-body layout.

Every change lands in the panel’s history bar, so undo and redo are one click away, and Reset to Defaults clears the section’s overrides entirely. See Section Style Settings for the rest of that panel.