Breaks & spacing

Four shortcuts handle the white space and breaks between passages: scene breaks, page breaks, explicit vertical space, and suppressed indentation. Reach for these instead of blank lines or manual spacing — they render correctly in every format.

Scene breaks

A scene-break marks a shift between scenes within a chapter. An empty block renders a centered * * * ornament:

::: scene-break
:::

Supply content to use your own ornament instead of the default:

::: scene-break
~ ~ ~
:::

In PDF the ornament is protected from being orphaned at the top of a page. If you use the same custom ornament throughout, define it once as a shortcut so every break stays clean:

pause:
  class: scene-break
  body: |
    ~ ~ ~

Page breaks

A pagebreak forces the next content onto a new page (PDF), a page-break in EPUB, and a native break in DOCX/ODT. It's always an empty block:

::: pagebreak
:::

Use it sparingly — chapters already start on a new page. It's for forcing a break mid-chapter, e.g. before a full-page figure.

Vertical space

A vspace inserts a measured gap. Empty block only; size is required:

::: {.vspace size="large"}
:::

• size — a named size (tiny, small, medium, large, huge) or a CSS length (1.5em, 3cm, 12pt)

The gap is exact in PDF. EPUB and other reflowable formats treat it as a hint — the reader supplies its own spacing, so the gap is approximate and a small vspace may be absorbed rather than shown. DOCX and ODT round to the nearest named size.

Suppressing indentation

Body paragraphs are first-line-indented by default in book layouts. The no-indent shortcut turns that off within its scope — for dedications, poetry, or title-page blocks where indentation is out of place:

::: no-indent
For my parents,\
who read to me.
:::

(The trailing \ forces the line break — Markdown otherwise joins the two lines into one paragraph.)

To turn first-line indentation off for the whole document, set indent-control: disabled in pandoc.yaml instead — see Book metadata.