Italics, Bold, Etc.

[Arekuzanra]

After consulting Google a few hundred times (with, obviously, no success), and then coming here and trying to decipher a few of the other answers, I've decided to finally just come forward and ask my question, and pray that someone can give me a nice little Christmas miracle to just make my day.

Alright, so, I have been turning some old .doc files into .pdf files in order to be able to read them in my new Kindle (it's the grey-scale one with wifi only... Uhhmm... As for 1, 2, 3, etc, I have NO IDEA... But I'm guessing it's a Kindle 2...? >_>). I finally mastered how to make the fonts big enough in the .doc file, so when I transfer it to .pdf and then over to my Kindle, I can actually read it without squinting or having to deal with the zoom in stuff.

However, I have run into a problem.

With some of these stories I have been putting onto my Kindle, there are some that are heavily accented with italics, whether it be to show the thought of a character, or to put emphasis on a certain (couple hundred) words. And, at times, the italics and normal fonts are used together to show a conversation between two types of characters... I'm pretty sure you catch my drift at this point.

Now, when I put these stories, these .doc transformed into .pdf files, onto my Kindle, I lose all that coding. It's all normal font. And it's not the .pdf file, because I made sure to skim through real fast and find my italics passages and saw that they transferred over just fine. It was the transferring from the computer over to the Kindle that had the problem.

I have tried things like putting my document into an HTML converter, so everything (such as the italics, page breaks, etc) had a carrot code (HTML with the little carrot signs). However, that did nothing, for when I transferred it over, it just showed me EXACTLY what I put in... As in, it showed me the carrot/HTML codes as if I'd just entered it into a word document.

I've been going at this for a couple of days now, and it really makes me quite sad that I can't get this to work out for me, because I'm one of those weird loner kids who'd rather sit in a corner and read a book than socialize with the other kids... Though, in my defense, they're all pretty immature, even for seniors in high school. >___> But the point is is that I love to read, and I'd love to read (and re-read) these stories I'm attempting to transfer over so I don't have to be constantly glued to my computer (which is hard to do at school!).

Please, please, PLEASE... Can anyone offer me a solution? In plain, blunt English, please. I may be computer saavy, but when people start throwing big 'hacker' words into their explanation, I can get kind of lost. >____>

[HarryT]

Don't use PDF - it's a very poor choice for an ebook reader. You'll have a lot more control over your document if you convert it to Mobipocket format instead.

[wallcraft]

The WiFi only model is the Kindle 3, which is the latest one.

I don't have a K3, but one thing you could try is embedding the font into your PDF. This makes them bigger, but it should allow the K3 to show the PDF exactly as it was in MS Word. See for example Microsoft Word/embedding a pdf file.

[RexGalore]

If you have converted it into HTML my suggestion is to use Caliber to convert that into mobi an transfer to your Kindle. Much better IMHO.
And if you have it in mobi you can change the text size on the fly on the Kindle.

[JeremyR]

As others have mentioned, PDFs are really the wrong format to use on a Kindle.

You want to use Mobi, which is basically the Kindle's native format. To convert a .doc file to that, you really need to first download a program called "Calibre" (google it and you can find it easy. It's free).

Then you want to save your .doc file to .rtf (or Rich Text). Windows Notepad will do this. For some reason, Calibre doesn't seem to convert .doc straight to Mobi (at least it didn't when I just tried it).

Calibre is pretty easy to figure out, if you have questions, just ask. You can also try emailing your docs to Amazon and have them do it, but the results are quite bad.

[Jack Tingle]

Are:

Easy recipe:
1) Go to www.mobipocket.com and install Reader.
2) Save your .doc file as a .rtf file. This isn't always necessary, but it improves the reliabiltiy of the process.
3) Open Reader and drop the .rtf file into it. It will be converted to .mobi and show up in the Mobipocket library.
4) Find the folder the new ebook appears in. On my Vista machine, it's 'username'\Documents\My ebooks. YMMV.
5) Hook your Kindle up to your computer with the USB cable.
6) Open the Kindle as a "removable storage device", like a thumb drive.
7) Move the file to the Kindle 'Documents' folder.
8) Close all the windows (or whatever) and safely remove the Kindle.
You're done. You can also have Reader move the file, but it puts it in the wrong folder on the Kindle. You then have to move the file to the 'Documents' folder manually, so save a step.

There are more sophisticated tools and methods for this, but converting a .doc to a .mobi will give you arguably the best result. Using the .rtf intermediary strips out some MS cruft that you probably don't want in the file and makes a cleaner conversion. (Thanks to Steve Jordan for that tip.)

PDFs can be generated similarly, but you need a lot more sophistication in the process. The easiest way to do that (AFAIK) is to use Open Office, set the page size to the screen size of your reading device, and export a PDF file. It took me quite a few tries to get a good result.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by Jack Tingle

Easy recipe:
1) Go to www.mobipocket.com and install Reader.

Unless you are using a Mac or Linux. Then Calibre is about it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JMikeD

Unless you are using a Mac or Linux. Then Calibre is about it.

Is it? I was under the impression that there was a Linux version of "kindlegen", but I may be mistaken.

[janvanmaar]

Is it? I was under the impression that there was a Linux version of "kindlegen", but I may be mistaken.

I don't know about that but the windows binary works just fine for me under Wine.

[Arekuzanra]

Thank you all soooo soooo sooooooo much! I downloaded both Mobipocket and Calibre, and found that Calibre worked better for me, personally, and I thank everyone for helping me out!!

You all are, like, sooo amazing! 8D Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone~! 8D

[JMikeD]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Is it? I was under the impression that there was a Linux version of "kindlegen", but I may be mistaken.

There may be. I haven't done anything with Linux for years, so I'm out of date on that.

[RMOP]

When I send a .doc file to Kindle using the CONVERT feature, this preserves most formatting, including endnotes (which function nicely as internal hyperlinks) but it strips all italics. Since there quite a bit of latin text in some of my documents, this is a real loss. What can I do to preserve italics? Is it possible to insert any sort of HTML-like code directly into the .doc files? I've found, in general, that the .doc files work better for me than using Calibre to generate .mobi files. But the italics bit is annoying.

Thanks.

[susan_cassidy]

Why did you resurrect a 3-year-old thread for this? You should have started a new thread.

Try converting .doc to filtered HTML, and see if that preserves the italics. Normally converting a .doc to mobipocket will retain the italics. Don't know why your doc is different. If it doesn't preserve them, you can then edit the HTML to re-add the italics, then convert that to .mobi.

[RMOP]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Why did you resurrect a 3-year-old thread for this? You should have started a new thread.

Try converting .doc to filtered HTML, and see if that preserves the italics. Normally converting a .doc to mobipocket will retain the italics. Don't know why your doc is different. If it doesn't preserve them, you can then edit the HTML to re-add the italics, then convert that to .mobi.

I INTENDED to start a new thread. Don't ask me why the forum dropped this as a reply into an old thread. I was browsing it, but I do have enough sense to start a new one, with a new topic. What say we split the blame the between my creeping senescence and the forum software? Anyway, thanks for the reply. Do you live here?

I don't see "Filtered HTML" as an option. In fact, I came across that suggestion (probably yours) in another post. Is this a Windows-specific option (I'm presently booted using OS X) or specific to an older version of Word? Under File -> Save as I've only got Web Page .htm as an option, nothing as Filtered HTML. I must be looking in the wrong place.

[RMOP]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Try converting .doc to filtered HTML, and see if that preserves the italics. Normally converting a .doc to mobipocket will retain the italics. Don't know why your doc is different. If it doesn't preserve them, you can then edit the HTML to re-add the italics, then convert that to .mobi.

Well, silly me. I do all of my reading on my Android phone, so I was looking for the italics there. Finally, I decided to do what I should have done first, and looked at my actual Kindle. The italics were just fine on the latter. Nice to know where the bug is, and the exercise gave me the incentive to clean up the formatting and a couple of typos in the document, so not all was lost. Thanks for reinforcing that it should (and does) work.