Alignment and Indentation#

The Markdown standard doesn’t have commands for aligning text, so novelWriter adds its own syntax for this. It also has syntax for indentation, which is similar to Markdown block quotes.

Paragraph Alignment and Indentation#

All documents have the text by default aligned to the left or justified, depending on your setting in Preferences.

You can override the default text alignment on individual paragraphs by specifying alignment tags. These tags are double angle brackets. Either >> or <<. You put them either before or after the paragraph, and they will “push” the text towards the edge the brackets point towards. This should be fairly intuitive.

Indentation uses a similar syntax. But here you use a single > or < to “push” the text away from the edge.

Example

Text Alignment and Indentation#
Syntax	Description
`>> Right aligned text`	The text paragraph is right-aligned.
`Left aligned text <<`	The text paragraph is left-aligned.
`>> Centred text <<`	The text paragraph is centred.
`> Left indented text`	The text has an increased left margin.
`Right indented text <`	The text has an increased right margin.
`> Left/right indented text <`	The text has both margins increased.

Note

The text editor will not show the alignment and indentation live. But the viewer will show them when you open the document there. It will of course also be reflected in the document generated from the Manuscript Build tool as long as the format supports paragraph alignment.

Alignment with Line Breaks#

If you have line breaks in the paragraph, the markers for all the lines are combined and used for the entire paragraph. For the following text, all lines will be centred:

Example

>> I am the very model of a modern Major-General <<
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

If you have multiple conflicting alignments on a paragraph, only one is applied. The order of precedence is:

Left alignment
Right alignment
Centred text
Justified text

Note

It is strongly recommended that you keep the Preserve Hard Line Breaks setting enabled in your manuscript build settings. This setting assumes all single line breaks in your text are intended. Turning this off makes adding line breaks more complicated, but it is still possible. See Alignment with Forced Line Breaks.

Alignment with First Line Indent#

If you have first line indent enabled in your manuscript build settings, you probably want to disable it for text in verses. Adding any alignment tags on a paragraph will cause the first line indent to be switched off for that paragraph.

Example

The following text will always be aligned against the left margin:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General <<
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

Alignment with Forced Line Breaks#

If you turn off Preserve Hard Line Breaks in your manuscript build settings, you can still force line breaks in paragraphs using the [br] shortcode. For clarity in the text, you can add a line break after it as well. It doesn’t result in two line breaks.

Keep in mind that when the text is processed, the lines on either side of a [br] shortcode are combined, and any trailing hard line break is ignored. This means that when such a paragraph is processed, these line breaks count as the same line. This affects how alignment tags are handled. For instance, this text becomes centred instead of left aligned.

>> I am the very model of a modern Major-General[br]
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral[br]
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical[br]
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical <<

Since this is understood as one line, this is the only way you can actually centre this paragraph.

Caution

Due to this difference in how text with [br] tags are processed, it is generally better to stick with the Preserve Hard Line Breaks setting enabled. It ensures a better correspondence between what you see in the editor and what output you get.