1.3 White Space Items

White Space Items

There are a number of white spaces items that are common in word processing and in typesetting and layout work that will not hold when exporting to EPUB. These include:

• Tabs
• Double word spaces
• Em-space, en-space, thin space and other kinds of spaces
• Empty paragraph returns before or after a heading or paragraph

In general, if you need space around an item the best practice is to build it into a paragraph style sheet. Avoid empty white space items as a way to build a page.

Tabs show up a lot in poetry, for example, to indent lines, or to create space within a line. Use text indents built into unique styles to achieve indents. I’ve borrowed an Emily Dickinson poem to show you what I mean in action. These two poems look identical, but when I turn on invisibles, we see that one is “hacked” with tabs, and one is styled with style sheets. Only the latter will survive the transition to EPUB. The tabs will go missing as will the spacing. 

In addition, beware of empty paragraph returns. It is not uncommon to get a file with five empty paragraph returns before a chapter title, and five empty paragraph returns after it, trailing empty returns at the end of a chapter, before a subhead, etc. These line spaces will not be preserved in an EPUB export so if that space is important to the layout and understanding of the text, be sure to build it into a paragraph style sheet.