“Styles” are a way to add semantic tagging to your manuscript. Semantic tagging is an extra layer of metadata about your book text. It consists of information about what kind of element each piece of text is: chapter title, body text, extract, and so on. This information is crucial both for knowing how to apply design elements to your text (e.g., adding a border around all extracts, making chapter titles larger, etc.), and for knowing how to parse your book text into the various output formats you need. For example, EPUB files are required to create a table of contents that points to all the chapters in your book, and correctly identifying all the chapter titles in your manuscript helps us to know what text to include in that table of contents. See the next section, “Paragraphs, Wrappers, Sections, and Inlines,” for details about the types of styles we use in Hederis.
When you upload a file to Hederis, we automatically make some guesses about the different parts of your manuscript, but you are the person who knows your content best. It’s a good idea to review our guesses, and adjust them as needed so that your manuscript is correctly tagged. See “Working With Microsoft Word” for details on how this works.
