Hi doc_mart
I've just finished formatting two books for an author for publication in Smashwords and Amazon DTP.
Both of those systems will recognise page breaks in your Word doc without any problem.
For paragraph level formatting (such as centered text), I recommend creating a specific style. For example, I created a style called "Centered" with the required formatting, and used that for any paragraphs which had to be centered on the page. I found that, with Meatgrinder, if you tried to apply paragraph level formatting using the "Normal" style and applying the formatting on top, Meatgrinder would lose it (though it's absolutely fine with character level formatting such as a few words made bold or italic, for example).
I should qualify that - it worked fine in the PDF, Mobi and ePub outputs in Smashwords. I simply couldn't get RTF to come out right (it kept doing chunks of text in all caps for some reason I haven't figured out yet), and I think it was the Sony reader version simply lost the centered formatting, but for the books I was formatting, that wasn't a huge issue.
I highly recommend James Byrd's article "
Adventures with Smashwords - Publishing an e-Book". He has some excellent advice and tips on formatting a book to get the best results from Meatgrinder. He and I were going through a similar process of discovery at around the same time, and if I'd written an article about it, I'd have said an awful lot of the same stuff as he does in that article. But he beat me to it.
- Donna