How to Use Subheadings

Can use presets

Subheadings (H1 through H6) help you create visual hierarchy within your sections.

How to Create a Subheading

1. Select the text you want to format as a subheading
2. Choose the heading level (H1 through H6) from the editor toolbar
3. View your formatted subheading instantly

Customizing Your Subheadings

When you select a subheading, its style panel opens. The panel has five tabs: Text, Spacing, Border, Breaks, and Colors. Each heading level (H1 through H6) keeps its own styling, so you can set them up once and reuse them throughout your book.

Text

• Font. Choose a typeface, or leave it on Inherit from Body to match your body text.
• Size. Set the size in points.
• Letter Spacing. Tighten or loosen the space between letters.
• Weight. Set how heavy the text is, and whether it is italic.
• Transform. Change the letter case: None, CAPS, lower, or Capitalize.
• Alignment. Place the heading left, center, right, or justified.

Spacing

Spacing Around Heading controls the space on all four sides of the heading. Link all four together, link them in pairs (Top & Bottom, Left & Right), or set each side on its own.

This tab also holds the print-only Trim Top Spacing on Page Start setting, described in Trim Top Spacing on Page Start below.

Border

• Enable Borders. Turn the border on or off.
• Thickness. Set the border width on each side.
• Spacing. Spacing Inside Border sets the gap between the heading text and its border. (When Colors is on, the Colors tab’s Spacing Around Text takes over this gap instead.)
• Style. Choose Solid, Dashed, or Dotted, and set the Roundness of the corners.

Breaks

• Prevent Page Breaks. Keeps the heading together with the content that follows it, so it does not get stranded at the bottom of a page. This is mainly a print setting. Some EPUB readers honor it, but the EPUB preview often will not show it, so check your print preview.
• Ornamental Breaks. Turn on Add Before Heading to place a decorative ornamental break above every heading of this level, then pick which ornamental break preset to use.

Coloring

The Colors tab gives a heading its own text color and a colored band behind it.

Turn on Enable Colors, then set:

• Text Color. The color of the heading text. Leave it on Inherit from Body to keep your normal text color.
• Background Color. The color of the band behind the heading. Leave it on Transparent for no band.
• Width. Full Width stretches the band across the whole content width. Around Text shrinks the band to hug just the heading text, like a highlighter.
• Spacing Around Text. The breathing room inside the band, between the heading text and the band’s edges.

A note on print color

Your colors show true in EPUB. For the printed book, Lacuna converts colors from RGB to CMYK (the SWOP color profile) in the preview, so bright, saturated colors may shift a little. Trust the print preview over the color picker.

Trim Top Spacing on Page Start

Print Only

This setting only affects your print-ready PDF.

When a heading happens to land at the very top of a new page, the empty space above it can look awkward. Turn on Trim Top Spacing on Page Start (on the Spacing tab) to remove that top space whenever the heading starts a new page, so it sits flush with the top margin. Anywhere else on the page, your spacing stays exactly as you set it. This only happens on page 2 and beyond.

Using Presets

You can save and reuse subheading styles with presets. This makes it easy to apply consistent formatting across all subheadings in your book.