Is there any way to visually indent the first line in a paragraph? I don’t mean adding literal tabs or spaces automatically. I’m not sure what Drafts app is written in, but I know this is possible with CSS.
The use case for this is writing fiction. Unlike writing standard markdown documents, fiction has an indented first line of the par and no double spacing between paragraphs. This makes it easier to read and write small paragraphs, such as lines of dialogue.
See my blogpost here for an example. Without text indentation, the text becomes this blob of mess:
When the time came for my passing, my family called the town voodoo doctor. As he looked at my injuries with clouded eyes, he told me he could do nothing for the living nor the dead.
“I can only offer my counsel,” He said, “Should you encounter a lighthouse on your journey to worlds beyond, know to turn way. Many are drawn to its comforting beacon, but a lighthouse is a stark warning– venture this path at your own peril.”
I did of course, not know what a lighthouse was. I had never seen one. There were no lighthouses in Mali. When I was finally laid to rest, I found myself in a desolate desert devoid of sand under a starless sky. I walked aimlessly for time unknown until I reached a beach, where an endless pier stretched over an endless shore.
My heart stopped when I saw the lighthouse on the jagged rocks. I had never seen one but I knew what it was. Vast whispers beckoned my heart forward and compelled my mind to abandon reason. A spider weaves a web. A hunter lays a trap. Who built this lighthouse?
Thank you, and I love the app by the way. The fact that it opens instantly is awesome.
Edit: I’m a developer– so if there’s a way to do this on my own I’m also happy to have a crack at it. Thanks
If you are writing in Markdown you can use the character entities   and   to denote an en space or an em space respectively, where an en space is half the point size and an em space is equal to the point size of the current font
There is no indentation option like that to display an indentation in the editor of the first line of each paragraph. Drafts ideals with plain text so you need to put everything in in plain text. It is more akin to a code editor than a word processor. It is only the word wrapping that creates the “effect”, as in the particular style described, it is every line that is indented (by a tabstop).
There is some styling available for syntaxes, but it does things like size and colour, not positioning in the editor. There is indentation, but I believe this indent all of the text in a matching section, not just the start of a paragraph.
You note that this is to aid reading, but perhaps there are a few options to explore to write differently to what is then output for reading?
You could maybe do something for previewing the text in Drafts, which is rendering it as HTML, but that sits alongside the editor. If you’re doing the indentation in CSS on that website, chances are you could reuse that in Drafts
You could, as noted manually indent, to give the same visual view. After all, that is what the tab character is for in plain text. If you didn’t want those tabs present when you take the text out, you could create a Drafts action to strip those tabs out and place that result in a file or in the clipboard. Equally you could have blank lines between paragraphs for the writing, and then strip them in an export action.
Hopefully that gives you a few things to consider.
Thanks for the suggestion– this saved me a bit of time trying to look into it myself.
Having indents in prose helps a lot with writing it too– there is a reason why the format is industry standard. Because each line of dialogue has to be on a separate line, it really helps differentiate them.
Overall this seems to be a niche feature request (I tried finding similar threads in the community before posting this). I’m not expecting it to be implemented, but I appreciate your response.
I think, ultimately, you have to have a distinction between a line break and a paragraph break somehow. Markdown chooses to do this using two line breaks. If you were to write the same in a word processor, you would just put the tab character in. I don’t know of any writing tool that automatically indents on a new line, because there are too many cases you have a new line that you would not want to indent (headings, lists, etc.)
As @sylumer covered, you could use tabs in Drafts, like in a word processor, if you want it to look that way in the editor. Or you could rely on that being part of the publishing process – e.g. outputting the Markdown to HTML, and styling it with CSS. The later being what probably makes the most sense if you publishing to the web, and you could easily make a custom preview in Drafts with that type of CSS to preview and read over your content.
Just to clarify– so that we’re on the same page. I am requesting a way to visually indent the first line of each paragraph while editing and without the use of tab characters for drafts in a particular workspace or with a particular tag.
The structured writing application Scrivener indents paragraphs like this by default, because it is is very helpful for differentiating blocks of dialogue with description in prose. In addition, I believe Microsoft Word can be set up to do the same using the ruler tool.
So why don’t I just use Scrivener? It’s a 10/10 excellent application for prose writing, but it’s meant for medium-large projects. A lot of the writing I do is spur-of-the-moment daily writing and ideas, more suited to an application like Drafts than Scrivener.
Seeing as I am the only person requesting this, I don’t expect it to be implemented. But thank you for the response.
Since you raised Scrivener, I used to use that some time back on both Apple OSes (including IOS) and Windows. Is used to use it for all sorts of writing. Authoring blog posts, compiling research and writing papers, etc. Scrivener can be practically used for any size piece of work, not just medium to large pieces. I actually found it useful for college ting those posts and papers into bigger collected structures, which ultimately built up into my writing for the day job collection. Even individual books can become a series of related books.
Scrivener works with plain text, but is adding a layer on top for the user to work through. Drafts doesn’t have a layer quite the same as that, so it isn’t able to do as much of the layout stuff as Scrivener - Drafts really is working at that plain text level; a plain text editor with some styling and them ng, but mainly text processing options.
Word is different again and is using tab stops and a rich text-based WYSIWYG interface. You can set leading indentation on a paragraph based on setting a style on the paragraph and a property for that style. This is something you can apply in Drafts on export, preview etc. as covered above, where it can be converted to rich content and set for a specific layout; but as far as plain text editing goes that is a different parafigm. To add a tab stop you would use a tab character. That was the analogue to tab stopping on a typewriter when digital writing began and it began as plain text just like we have in Drafts.
Givn you would need to use a tab, another idea that occurs to me is to create an action to insert a tab and return. Other than the first line/paragraph, you could use that action instead of return. Alternatively if you are only doing this on Mac and have access to say Keyboard Maestro, you could override the return key to tab and return when in Drafts (only). Obviously that would then apply to other parts of the Drafts UI, so use that return key wisely at that point.