Affinity publisher and hanging indents for fiction book layouts.

[HeikeT]

Hi there, I searched the forums for "hanging indents" but the topics I found all seem the refer to lists, indexes, and tables. 

What I am after is "hanging indent" in the sense that the first paragraph in a new scene is not indented and subsequent paragraphs within the scene are indented normally.

That is a very basic task in typesetting for fictions books, and I know it must be somewhere but I can't find it . 

This is an example: The word Tayl after the scene change (Tayl stared ... ). Should not be indented ... 

Help? 

Thank you . 

The word

 

[Komatös]

Hi @ HeikeT 

Go to Studio tab "Paragraph" and change the first line indend.

[HeikeT]

That would change the first line indents in all the paragraphs using that style. I only need to remove the first indent after a scene or POV change.

Usually you would expect to find something like this in "flow" settings ...  

[HeikeT]

Just to give some context this is how the setting looks in Scrivener ... 

 

[GarryP]

You can set-up two paragraph styles, one with no indent for the first paragraph, and the second with the indent for the following paragraphs.
You can then tell the software to use the second style after the first style – see attached image.
However, this only works – in my experience – when you are entering text and can’t be used to format existing text. (I would be happy to learn otherwise.)

[HeikeT]

@GarryP Hmmm ... I have come to the same conclusion ... this is really bad. It's so basic typesetting for books that even Scrivener (not a layout app at all) has found a way to do this ... 

Ah well ... now I need to change the first paragraph styles in about 244 places in a 146k words manuscript ... on an old Mac book Air ... using 3 different body styles ... 

That will teach me .  

@GarryP thank you very much for the tips on how to set up the styles! 

[tudor]

2 minutes ago, HeikeT said:

It's so basic typesetting for books that even Scrivener (not a layout app at all) has found a way to do this ...

Not even the "big guns" InDesign and QuarkXpress have this feature.

[HeikeT]

@tudor thank you for letting me know ... very strange indeed. Book designers must have endless patience or curse a lot .

[Old Bruce]

Why not use a line break before 'Hey or rather after retreating back. 

[HeikeT]

@Old Bruce That would outdent 'Hey...' not indent 'Tayl'  And it is only one example in 20k lines.

I try to stick to standard formatting for dialogue, dialogue tags, and dialogue surrounds ... I guess it's a case of just going through the manuscript and make the changes as @GarryP suggested. 

For other migrating manuscripts form #Scrivener to #AffinityPublisher to create the print pdfs for KDP ... it actually is totally fine on import (text place using an RTF), and the indents are 'flattened' as you defined in Scrivener. It's when you start to tweak styles in Affinity that Affinity 'unflattens' the first paragraphs ... so there is a lesson to be learnt here, but I am not yet sure what it is . I'll write this all up in a blog once I am finished. 

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, HeikeT said:

@Old BruceThat would outdent 'Hey...' not indent 'Tayl'  And it is only one example in 20k lines.

What I would do then is make a Paragraph Style called Scene Change and use on the Scene Changes. Just have no indent set for Scene Change. We can set up Keyboard shortcuts to choose Paragraph Styles so set one up for Scene Change and have its Next Style (in the Style part of the Text Styles dialog) be set to whatever the proper next style would be.

[pbasdf]

13 hours ago, HeikeT said:

What I am after is "hanging indent" in the sense that the first paragraph in a new scene is not indented

How do you identify a "new scene"?  If you can prescribe some rules for that, it might be possible to prepare a Regex find/replace that applies a different paragraph style to the first paragraph.

[lacerto]

If there is a preceding formatting that determines the use of the following non-indented style, a regular search replace could be used to apply the required non-indenting paragraph style, like below, where "Body First" is applied after Heading 1 and Break styles. In apps like InDesign and QuarkXPress scripting can be easily used (and saved for future use) to do things like this so perhaps this explains why there are no special "flattening" styling attributes.

 

As Publisher does not support scripting, you'd need to do these sorts of things manually but it would nevertheless be faster than going through the required paragraphs one by one. 

Btw, it is possible to apply "Paragraph Style, then Next Style" to format text blocks with multiple styles, but this does not much help here (you could apply e.g. a heading style and "Body First" in one go, but it is still slow).

[lacerto]

This RegEx borrowed from InDesign forum replaces Body Text formatting (with first  line indent) with Body First formatting (no first line indent) for first body text paragraphs the first time it is applied (next time it would replace the second body text paragraphs with Body First, then the third ones, etc.

 

 

[HeikeT]

@pbasdf mostly what @lacerto suggested above ... something like ...  IF paragraph EQUALS 'body style' BUT paragraph before IS NOT 'body style' THEN change paragraph = 'body style' TO paragraph = 'body style first' (sorry for the 'not so much code')

Thank you @lacerto I'll look into those options. 

I am just glad I am not the only one ! 

Thank you everybody! 

 

[HeikeT]

Ah and I see you could run such a script only once ... unless you add some nifty 'But you already changed me' exceptions ... 😇 

[lacerto]

4 hours ago, HeikeT said:

Ah and I see you could run such a script only once

Yes, therefore not so useful. A simple script could use this regex and check e.g. that the previous paragraph does not already have Body First styling (and add other conditions, if necessary)... but in context of Publisher manual work cannot be avoided.

[pbasdf]

4 hours ago, HeikeT said:

I see you could run such a script only once

If you need to run it a second time, first use find/replace to change all instances of the Body First format to Body.