In the publishing world, the tab button on your keyboard is evil, particularly to a book formatter. Book publishing formatters would love nothing more than to remove every tab button from every keyboard in existence. Why? Because they have to remove every single tab you put in your manuscript. You know whenever you start a new paragraph and hit tab? They have to remove it. Every. One. Commit to never using the tab button again, and you will make your publisher very happy. And happy publishers keep signing your books.
"Why? Pray, tell, are they so evil?" You might wonder. Because indentations are used in publishing, not tabs. The tab button gives you no choice on how large you want it to be. Worse yet, when making changes on an entire page, or the entire manuscript, they don't register as indents, which means the spaces you created with them can be lost. Simply put, tabs are a formatting nightmare.
"But then, how do I indent my paragraphs?" Ah, I'm glad you asked. Indent is the keyword in your question. Click on the "Home" button on the top of your manuscript in Word, then click on the expand arrow in the "Paragraph" group. In the pop-up box: The second section down is titled "Indentation". It is here you'll need to set your indentation. "Left" and "Right" should be at "0". "Special" should be on "First Line", and "By" can be anywhere from .25 to .5. The distance is up to you. This doesn't matter so much to us because once you have set indentation and use them instead of tabs, they are easy for our formatters to change should we need to. On the other hand (as we discussed above) tabs are not easy to change.
BONUS: Since we're in here, under the "Spacing" section make sure "Before" and "After" are both set at "0" and make sure the box is checked for "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style".
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