DocumentationDesigning the book
Text
Typeface, size, line spacing, alignment, hyphenation and first-line indent — the six settings that decide how the prose reads.
These settings apply to body prose. Quotes, verse, captions and headings have their own, set in FormattingBlocks.
Typeface
The picker groups faces two ways:
- Ships with the book — EB Garamond, Inter, JetBrains Mono, Literata, Sorts Mill Goudy, Source Serif 4. Held on this device, so they work with no connection and export with no delay.
- Downloaded when the book is built — the Google Fonts catalogue. Fetched once and then cached.
Size
Range 7 to 18 pt, in steps of 0.25.
9 to 13 pt is the range for a trade book. Below 10 pt is a mass-market paperback. Above 13 pt is large print.
Type size interacts with trim size and page count: a point larger is a longer book, which costs more to print and may cross into a wider gutter band.
Line height
Range 1 to 2.2, in steps of 0.01. A multiplier on the type size.
1.4 is tight, 1.6 is generous. A face with a large x-height needs more.
Alignment
| Setting | Result |
|---|---|
| Justified | Both edges flush. The convention for a novel |
| Ragged right | Left edge flush, right edge natural |
| Centred | |
| Ragged left | Right edge flush |
Hyphenation
| Setting | Result |
|---|---|
| Automatic | Words are broken at correct points for the book’s language |
| Only at soft hyphens | Only where you typed a break yourself |
| Never | No hyphenation |
Leave this on Automatic if the text is justified. Justification works by stretching the spaces in a line; without hyphenation, a line holding one long word has to stretch its remaining spaces enormously, and the white gaps line up down the page into what typographers call rivers.
Words are never broken if they are shorter than six letters, and never if they are capitalised — a hyphenated proper name reads as a typesetting error. No more than one line per paragraph is broken.
First-line indent
Range 0 to 3, in steps of 0.1.
Zero sets the book with a blank line between paragraphs instead, which is a screen convention rather than a book one. Most novels use an indent of about 1.2 em.
The first paragraph of a chapter is set flush by convention, whatever this is set to, because there is nothing above it to separate it from.
The indent shows in the preview and in every export, not while you write: the writing canvas keeps
paragraphs flush so that the only indent you see there is one you set yourself with Tab.
What is not here
Multi-column body text, vertical writing, and per-page adjustments (“push this line to the next page”) are not exposed. The last one is deliberate: manual page fixes fight repagination, and widows, orphans and keep-with-next are the principled version of the same control.