Paragraphs and Other Content Styles

The paragraph style is the main tool for controlling how your document looks. Rather than formatting each paragraph by hand, you say what a paragraph is and let the template decide how it should appear.

The style dropdown sits on the toolbar:

The built-in styles

• Chapter Title — the chapter's title.
• Section, Subsection, Subsubsection — the three heading levels below it. See Chapter Titles, Parts, and Section Headings.
• Paragraph — ordinary body text.
• Blockquote — an extended quotation, set apart from the body. See Block quotes below.
• Display Math — a paragraph holding a displayed equation. See Math.
• Bibliography Entry — a manually written bibliography entry, for references not managed by the citation tools.
• Index Entry and Index Subentry — for hand-built index material. See Index.
• Comment (In Document) — shown grey and italic in the editor and excluded from the built book. This is the place for notes to yourself: research reminders, queries for your editor, alternative wordings.

Block quotes

A block quote is a container, not just a way of styling paragraphs, so it can hold more than prose. Select everything you are quoting — including any lists or other material — and choose Blockquote. The whole selection moves inside the quotation together, and a list quoted this way stays within the quote's indentation instead of breaking out of it.

To leave a quotation, put the cursor in it and choose another style, usually Paragraph. That takes the paragraph back out of the quote.

Kinds of quotation

Because a quote is a container, it has settings of its own, under Project Settings → Block Quotes: how far it is indented, the space above and below it, the space between its paragraphs, and the typography of everything inside.

Two come built in. Blockquote is the ordinary extended quotation. Verse is for poetry — it leaves the lines as the poet broke them, neither justified nor indented — and is what the Insert Verse button produces.

At the bottom, (New Custom Style) creates a style of your own. Once defined it appears in the dropdown alongside the built-ins and gets its own entry in Project Settings, so it can be restyled everywhere at once.

Custom text styles — which apply to a selection rather than a whole paragraph — are a separate dropdown; see Advanced Formatting Features.

Project settings for paragraph styles

Project Settings → Paragraphs lists every style. Changing one there changes every paragraph using it, throughout the book.

Each style offers:

• Alignment — left, right, centred, or fully justified.
• Font — over 1,500 available.
• Font Size.
• Line Height — increase for double spacing.
• Bold and Italic — applied to the whole paragraph.
• Indent — indent the first line.
• Hanging Indent — indent every line except the first.
• Top Margin and Bottom Margin — space above and below each paragraph.
• Top Group Margin and Bottom Group Margin — space above and below a run of consecutive paragraphs in this style, rather than around each one. This is how you get space around a block quotation without spacing out its individual paragraphs.
• Keep With Next — prevent a page break between this paragraph and the next.
• Inset — narrow the paragraph, adding space on both sides.

Overriding one paragraph

To change a single paragraph without touching the style, use Local Settings: click the Local Settings icon , put the cursor in the paragraph, and open the Paragraph section.

The same applies to headings, block quotations, lists, and display math — put the cursor in the element and the panel offers the matching section.

Any setting you override gets a Reset button that returns it to the project default, so you can always tell what you have changed and undo it.

As a rule, reach for the project setting first and the local override only for genuine one-offs — that is what keeps a long manuscript consistent.