I have had a quick look at Styles, and what I say is true. I can only find two Styles (Manuscript and Traditional) that create indents, and BOTH of them do so merely by moving the first line indent marker (which, of course, I could do manually if that were any sort of solution). Neither removes the blank line.

In the link you gave me, it specifically states "A Style is a collection of formatting instructions". Indeed. Which is why your solution won't survive conversion.

Fumie: your claim that what I have described is not an indented paragraph suggests you are thinking purely in terms of Word. I am talking about typography, not computing. Since Caxton's time, indents have been made by three or more spaces (three or more 'ens'). Since all formatting is about to be destroyed, we have to go back to basics like this.

For, after conversion, I am going to end up with just an ASCII string and some carriage returns ... which is hardly surprising since an e-book has no pages and each e-book platform has different sizes of screen.