Indenting Paragraphs (and Poems) in "WYSIWYG" Apps Like Word and Pages
Most of us are familiar with how to indent a paragraph (or a poem) in "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) writing apps, like Word.
You select the text and click an indent button, like this:
After you click the indent button, the whole text will be indented to the right, like this:
Indenting Paragraphs (and Poems) In Plain Text In a Leanpub Book
Leanpub books aren't written in this WYSIWYG style, but are instead written in plain text.
This means you need to type the formatting instructions into the manuscript directly, essentially saying "indent this text" yourself.
To learn more about the power of writing books in plain text, please see this long but entertaining article:
In the following sections, we'll show you four different ways to indent an ordinary paragraph, and poetry.
The Ordinary Blurb Method
You can easily created indented "blurbs" in a Leanpub book by typing B> at the beginning of each blurb line, like this:
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example below.
B> So they lov'd, as love in twain
B>
B> Had the essence but in one;
B>
B> Two distincts, division none:
B>
B> Number there in love was slain.
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example above.
Here's what this will look like the in the PDF:
The Ordinary Blurb Method With A Line Spacing Trick
If you don't like the line spacing in the example above, you can add two empty spaces at the end of each line, instead of adding an empty B> line between the lines:
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example below.
B> So they lov'd, as love in twain
B> Had the essence but in one;
B> Two distincts, division none:
B> Number there in love was slain.
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example above.
Here is a screenshot of the example above, with blue boxes showing where the two empty spaces are typed:
Here's what this will look like the in the PDF:
The Text "Code Block" Method
Leanpub has special formatting for writing blocks of computer code.
You can use this feature to create a "text" block of code, where you can type spaces at the beginning of each line to indent it, like this:
```text
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
```
You will probably need to adjust the code font type, code font size, and turn off automatic code line numbering in a Custom book Theme. Here is an article on this topic:
Here's what this will look like the in the PDF:
The Invisible Blank Space Special Character Method
When you're writing in plain text, there are special invisible characters available for you to use.
To create a blank space in a Leanpub book, copy the invisible "ideographic space" text character between the underscores below:
_ _
You can add any number of these spaces at the beginning of a line, like this:
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Here's what this will look like the in the PDF:
The Exception and A Solution
If your book is set to "Indent first line of paragraphs", you will get this result instead of the one above, where there is an indent in the first line:
You can use a little hack to fix this by typing a caret ^ on the line above the paragraph or poem, like this:
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example below.
^
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
This is just a line of ordinary text to show the indenting in the example above.
Here is a screenshot of the above example, pointing to where the caret ^ is:
This will remove the indent:
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