Different paragraph format within a text box

Bloom Bloom Feature Requests
1

Currently in Bloom, we can choose to have some text in a text box in bold or italics, but not the whole text, so that can enable us to have a heading or other special text.

I am working on the Look, Listen, Live books for device, and in the text box, it has a heading, a Bible reference, and then the story. I would like the heading and the Bible reference to be left aligned with NO indent, but I would like the story text to have a paragraph indent. However, if I select the left alignment with indent option, then the heading and the Bible reference also have the indent.

I would like to be able to have a separate paragraph formatting for the heading and Bible reference, and a different paragraph format for the story text - all within the one text box. Is this something that the Bloom software team could make possible?

Currently one way to overcome this is to have the heading and Bible reference in a separate text box with its own formatting. However, these stories are longer than the text box and require scrolling, so when the heading and Bible reference are at the top in a separate text box, they always stay on the page and don’t scroll up. It would be ideal if they could be in the same text box, with different formatting, so that they would also go up and out of sight when scrolling through the rest of the story.

I have attached two images as examples - one with how the formatting affects the whole text box, and one with a separate text box for the heading and Bible reference.

LLL book 1 example 1
LLL book 1 example 11760×837 133 KB

LLL book 1 example 2
LLL book 1 example 21755×830 132 KB

2

Hi Julie,

Here’s what would do:

  1. Turn off the indent. That’s visual noise we don’t need here.
  2. Set the Space between Paragraphs to 0.5
  3. In between the title and the reference, use Shift+Enter so that you don’t get a new paragraph there:

image
image554×599 124 KB

– John

3

Thanks, John, for the suggestion–I’ve also been pondering Julie’s question and wondering how to keep the paragraph indent for text but not for a title or heading at the top of the text box. One comment, though:

One consideration in formatting books for new readers is to familiarize them with conventions used in “regular books” (i.e., for advanced readers), including indented paragraphs–especially in the printed versions of this type of book. So the decision to remove paragraph indent is about more than just “visual noise.” In the case of Julie’s phone format compared with your example, Julie’s does not add linespace between paragraphs, so the indent serves as the only paragraph break indicator in her book. If she removes the indent she will need to add space between paragraphs, which decreases the number of lines visible on the screen, making the decision a bit more complicated. Also, the same solution needs to apply to both print and phone app versions of many of our Bloom books, to make it easy to switch page formats per Drag to move text box and images, which is also very helpful.

4

I second what Kim is saying. I want to keep the indent for literature/reading conventions. For a print version, it doesn’t matter if the heading and Bible reference are in a separate text box as there won’t be the scrolling, so for me it’s more of an issue for the device format.

BUT actually, your suggestion of Shift-Enter does fix the problem! I did a Shift-Enter BEFORE the Heading and also after it/before the Bible reference, and that brings both those lines into left alignment without the indent.