Style question

[kramblings]

Hi guys, am using the iPad app along with the Mac app and so far they are seamless. Yay!

 

I cannot get the Default Style style to indent (the bottom of the MS says "--> Not Available"). This has been VERY annoying as I've had to press the space bar 5 times for a new paragraph rather than merely pressing the tab button. How can I fix this?

 

I've cut/pasted some text from Pages and have changed the font - is this where I went wrong? I tried importing the entire file from Pages and it was a disaster (all formatting lost, styles all over the place), so am now importing the Pages version in chunks.

 

Help!

 

Thank you!

[Steve]

Hi kramblings,

 

I cannot get the Default Style style to indent (the bottom of the MS says "--> Not Available"). This has been VERY annoying as I've had to press the space bar 5 times for a new paragraph rather than merely pressing the tab button. How can I fix this?

 

It sounds like either you've got the tab key shortcut enabled and there is no "Tab" style defined in the style, or your default style doesn't have any tab stops defined.

 

If you want to use the tab key to indent your paragraphs:

 

1) Open the Preferences window, select the Text Editing icon, and make sure the "Pressing Tab in an empty paragraph cycles through styles" checkbox is unchecked.

 

2) Place the cursor is some text having the style you want to use for body text paragraph, choose Format > Style > Edit Current Style, and make sure the style has a default (0.5 works fine for Courier) and at least one stop.

 

However, consider using the first line indent setting rather than a tab character to indent your paragraphs. If you do, creating Kindle and ePub versions of your manuscript will be straight forward, and you'll save yourself a keystroke on each paragraph.

 

To set a first line indent in a style:

 

1) Place the cursor is some text having the style you want to use for body text paragraph, choose Format > Style > Edit Current Style.

 

2) Set the First Line Indent property to something appropriate (like 0.5).

 

Then every time you use this style, the proper indent will be applied, and you can use the Tab key to change styles (a productivity trick borrowed from screenwriters). The Novel template is set up this way, so if you're interested in doing this, create a test project from the Novel template, edit the Section Text style, and take a look at how the Tab Style property is set up.

 

-Steve

[hamishmacdonald]

Hi there. New Storyist owner here—for the iPad, and probably the Mac before long. It's a great program, and is especially astounding on the iPad, where I've been investigating every possible form of word processor and markup notepad. Storyist is a powerhouse at handling text compared to the rest of them (barring Pages), plus it has all this extra help for planning and writing a novel. Thanks for creating it!

 

Now, my issue:

 

I'm not handy with CSS, but I'd like to have the first paragraph in a chapter and after a scene-break *not* be indented. (I've never seen an indented first paragraph used in print.) Have you, or anyone on these boards, happened to have come up with a pre-rolled bit of CSS to achieve this?

 

Thanks!

 

[Steve]

Hi Hamish,

 

Thanks for the kind words!

 

If you're just targeting iPad, you can select (target) the first paragraph after a heading with this:

 

h1 > p {

text-indent:0;

}

 

This is fairly simple CSS and may work on other ePub readers too, but you should test it.

 

-Steve