Kindle and paragraph formatting

I haven't published an ebook via Amazon, but I have been sending my own Word DOCs to my Kindle after passing them through Amazon's conversion service, and run into this same problem.

I insert tabs manually by hitting the tab key each new paragraph--I don't let Word auto-format them (i.e. automatically tab-indent each new paragraph). That seems to be what causes the problem. Documents with auto-formatted tabs (the kind you can't hit backspace on and erase) appear to format correctly when converted to Kindle format via Amazon's conversion program. Documents with manually-inserted tabs don't format properly...sometimes. It's inconsistent.

So you can try formatting the document without any manual tabs, just auto-indent, which appears to work consistently.

The other solution is to forgo tabs altogether, and instead use Word's "Add Space After Paragraph" on the whole document. This translates perfectly to Kindle format.

In fact, I found that because I ALWAYS manually tab each new paragraph, I can just run the Add Space After Paragraph function on my entire document and keep the tabs, and when I send it to my Kindle, it formats without tabs, but with spaces between paragraphs, like this post.

cethklein said:

I decided to try publishing using amazon DTP. Just figured I'd publish a short story jsut to see how it all works. I've noticed an issue though/ My story was composed using Word but has no complex formatting/ But when I view the preview in DTP, half the paragraphs didn't indent/ I fixed this by manually re-indenting them in word. But shorter paragraphs indent the WHOLE paragraph instead of just the first line/ :



Anyonw know how to resolve this? Or will it look right on an actual Kindle (i.e. is the preview screen just screwed up

Click to expand...

I've spotted this on e books I have purchased.

Formatting:
Amazon
1. Pull up the paperback version of your book format. Delete all the fancy formatting (i.e., drop caps, extra returns, extra spacing) –Italics are not fancy, keep them in then save it as an .html file in Word.

Somewhat apropos, I've been reading all my subs of requested partials and fulls on my Kindle. Not only is it much easier on the eyes than sitting in front of the computer hour after hour, but it cuts down on the temptation to check my email one more time and other internet time wasters.

But unfortunately, there are sometimes some weird things that happen to a Word document when they've gone through the converter. PDF files seem to come across with fewer glitches.

I changed my Word doc to html before uploading to Amazon DTP. Text came out fine.

Mystery1 said:

I changed my Word doc to html before uploading to Amazon DTP. Text came out fine.

Click to expand...

This.

HTML as source file works really well when you're trying to convert to other formats. Just did this yesterday to create a downloadable excerpt for my upcoming release, using these steps:

1. In Word, save the document as HTML. File>Save As>select HTML as type
2. Imported into Calibre, then attached cover jpg
3. Used Calibre's conversion feature to convert to MOBI, EPUB, LIT and PDF
4. Viewed each version and formatting was very clean using HTML as the source file. Also Calibre automatically inserted the cover image as Pg 1. Worked beautifully if you need to do that type of thing.

Good luck!

Anything here you can use?
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,42600.0.html


Sharon

nitaworm said:

Formatting:
Amazon
1. Pull up the paperback version of your book format. Delete all the fancy formatting (i.e., drop caps, extra returns, extra spacing) –Italics are not fancy, keep them in then save it as an .html file in Word.

Click to expand...

And yet, I've done this twice so far today and it's not working. I took my .doc file, put in the page breaks at the end of each chapter, took out the header and footer, followed Amazon's directions to the letter, including downloading and using the Mobipocket creator (converting my doc file to html, etc.) I have three words in italics about 8 chapters in, and it converted the whole rest of that chapter to italics when read on the kindle. (I'm using a kindle borrowed from the library to check how the ebook looks before uploading.) Now I don't want to upload it, because it's so messed up. I've checked the html source code and it is not in the html file, the screwup is happening when I convert the html to the .opf file for the kindle.

Anybody else see this problem? I found one article by googling, someone who had this problem with an ebook they paid for.

It is pretty easy, but you have to either convert to html, or pass your manuscript from Word, through Notepad, to the Amazon uploader.

Word adds its own code which does not translate well to other formats (which is why so many blog owners who write in Word and then copy and paste into their blogs end up with such weird looking formats).

For a step-by-step walk through, read this article: http://www.theessentialebooker.com/publish/readers/

As a note: if you've inserted bullets, used fancy fonts, etc. from Word, you will have to drop these before uploading to DTP.