Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0002: How to work with encodings | Next: KB0004: How to format drop caps
See also:
Why does Jutoh warn about direct formatting?
Why does Jutoh warn about blank paragraphs?
All about style sheets in the Jutoh manual
Whether you import from a word processor file, or type text into Jutoh, sometimes the result is not satisfactory because you may not have obeyed some formatting rules important for successful and consistent ebook creation.
Here are some guidelines for formatting text in Jutoh.
Do not use direct (ad hoc) formatting unless you absolutely cannot avoid it. Direct formatting is when you select some text and then apply a font, size, paragraph spacing or other attribute to the text from a toolbar or menu command. While this is tempting, try instead to define named paragraph and character styles in your project style sheet and use those. Then you can guarantee consistency and easily change formatting throughout the document if you need to. You can, however, bend the rules for simple formatting such as bold and italics.
You can tell if you have used direct formatting by clicking on a paragraph and observing if the style in the Formatting Palette (Styles tab) shows a long name containing "+" symbols. Other giveaways that you are using direct formatting: all your paragraph styles contain the name "Normal", and you use a lot of character styles for font family and size. Instead, decide what styles you need, go into the Project Properties, click on the Styles page, and edit or create styles that reflect the formatting you need. Apply these styles to the paragraphs in your document. Then, if you need to make changes to the whole document, you can edit the style definitions and not every single relevant paragraph in your entire book. It may seem a hassle to set this up, but it will save you aggravation and time in the long run.
Note that you can save time applying styles to your document by assigning shortcuts to named styles. Press Ctrl+. to start defining some new shortcuts (see below).
Don't use blank lines (empty paragraphs) or hard line breaks (Ctrl+Enter) to add space between paragraphs. Instead, define before and after paragraph spacing in named styles. Blank lines may not be acceptable for some ebook reader devices or publishers and it is hard to achieve consistency or precision this way.
Don't use tabs; they're not supported in Epub and Kindle books. Edit the named paragraph style if you need to indent the first line. The Format | Book | Formatting Cleanup dialog can help you remove tabs or replaced them with appropriate styles.
Use standard, consistent heading styles, for example "Heading 1". Headings in this form are recognised by reader software and will be formatted appropriately. Conversely, to have more control over heading formatting, don't use the "Heading n" form, use your own convention instead.
These are some of the Jutoh features you can use to improve the appearance of your book.
Jutoh has a feature for removing some problematic formatting from your whole book. Not all options will apply to everyone's document but it could save you some time. See the Format | Book | Formatting Cleanup command for more details.
If you need to change a lot of styles, keyboard shortcuts can save you a lot of time compared with using the drop-down style control on the toolbar. You can type Ctrl+Period and then Edit Shortcuts, or use the View | Customise Shortcuts menu command, and associate keyboard shortcuts with frequently-used styles. In the Shortcut customisation dialog, scroll down to the Styles category, select a style, and click Edit. Now assign a primary or secondary shortcut. For more information, see “How to customise keyboard shortcuts”.
Show the Formatting Palette with View | Formatting Palette or Alt+P. Click on the Styles tab, and then double-click on a style to apply it to the current paragraph (or span of text if applying a character style). Use the More button to show a menu for further operations including editing the selected style, and clearing formatting.
You can bulk-replace paragraph and character styles via the Find and Replace command on the Edit menu.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0002: How to work with encodings | Next: KB0004: How to format drop caps