"A formatting we shall go, a formatting we shall go, hiegh-ho, the dairy-o, a formatting we shall go..."

The one bane of my self-publishing existence thus far has been the annoyance of not being able to line up the indented material in my text.  Since my book is legally based, I reference a lot of case law.  Any quote that is longer than three typed lines requires special attention.  It is called block quotation or long quotation.  As you recall from English class, you make a small paragraph with smaller font, indent it, and then return to your regular text.  It looked great in Word, but when I posted the book onto Kindle or CreateSpace, it looked all out of whack.  

Here is what I have been dealing with ever since I first posted my text on these sites (see where it says "Marriage is one...":

As you can see, I have set the Microsoft Word options to show me the formatting.  The arrows are tabs and the backwards P means paragraph (to figure out how to do this on your own computer, simply use your Help options when in Word or search online).  Clearly, there are tabs where tabs should not be.  What would make these tabs move all over the place?  I mean, I did not put the tab there in the first place!  What would make it do that?  Hmmm...

  A-Ha!  I needed to end each line with an "enter".  I needed to create little paragraph to set the boundary on the line for the CreatSpace software to comprehend where to end.  Can you see the difference?  Tab - > Text PARAGRAPH.  

On and on, I feverishly ran through the text.  Once I was done, I cleaned it all up a bit:

 

The finished product looks soooo much better.  Huge improvement.  I really think it will improve the readers' perception on the quality of the work.  I am sure if I picked up a book and saw lots of inconsistencies with formatting, I would question the reliability of its contents.  

It took me a couple of hours to really get the formatting problems down.  For anyone using the CreateSpace service, you should just keep plugging away with these minor details.  Personally, this was a MAJOR accomplishment in my own book.  I feel so much better knowing I took the time to get it right rather than just letting it look a mess.  

I have just reloaded this file into the Kindle edition.  I hope to see that this improved the formatting issues there as well.  This is so much fun!  

CC