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Old 07-11-2010, 09:55 AM   #1
doc_mart
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Quick Formatting Q: (Smashwords and DTP)

Quick Formatting Q: (Smashwords and DTP)
My wife and I are working on a Niche community educational flash card tool. Wondering if people can help us move ahead. I have done some text formatting before, but I think you all could take the guess work out of this.

We want to have words by themselves in the top, middle of a first page

Then when you hit next page it moves to the definition in the middle of the word by itself on p. 2. Then it moves to the next word etc.

My question is largely about pagebreaks and the DTP/MeatGrinder:

DTP: If I format this by using page breaks and centering in O_o or other wordprocessor, will it pick up the formatting or should I do it in html? Would someone give an example of how to set up tags for it?

MeatGrinder: will the MG "read" page breaks? I have read in places that is does. Format guide says that centering is no problem.

The thing about the tool is that if page breaks won't work we probably wouldn't be able to do it as we have it in our heads.

thanks.
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Old 07-11-2010, 01:26 PM   #2
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***I think you all could take the guess work out of this***

Good to have your company, Doc. But I don't think you'll make too many friends here if you blame us for your problems. Better to politely ask advice of experienced members, no? Cheers. Neil
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Old 07-11-2010, 01:57 PM   #3
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Hey Neil,

Thanks for the welcome. Much appreciated. Not sure how our communication is crossed... but I am not blaming anyone for my issues, just sincerely trying to get some advice on this (maybe a language issue).

So, it was meant as nothing other than a polite inquiry. Any help would be appreciated.

Warmest Regards,
DM
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Old 07-11-2010, 02:03 PM   #4
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My apologies, DM. Misunderstood. I'm sure someone much mkore technically gifted will be along soon to help out. No hard feelings? Cheers. Neil
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Old 07-11-2010, 02:12 PM   #5
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Thank you. Certainly none!
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Old 08-06-2010, 12:57 AM   #6
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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
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