Help Converting book to MOBI

[MevagisseyMedic]

Hi I am having problems with converting a Book in Word to MOBI
When converted to MOBI the text in the book looks like this with no paragraph gaps and text staggered on each line.


Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.
He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.

Instead of looking like This

Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.

He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.


Help Please

[gmw]

You don't mention what/how you are trying to do this conversion. If you mention that you're using Calibre then the moderators might move this to the right subforum for you. If you're using some other method then you need to say. For example I produce an epub from OpenOffice using the Writer2xhtml filter, and then I use Amazon software to convert the epub to mobi.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by MevagisseyMedic

Hi I am having problems with converting a Book in Word to MOBI
When converted to MOBI the text in the book looks like this with no paragraph gaps and text staggered on each line.


Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.
He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.

Instead of looking like This

Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.

He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.


Help Please

Well, honestly:

Neither is right. It looks like you have a manuscript riddled with broken paragraphs (turn on your Pilcrow to see the hidden formatting codes), because you should not have a line break between, for example, "was rapidly getting worse." and "Not only did he have to appear unannounced ...," never mind the lack of vertical whitespace between the paragraphs.

You'll need to do two things: first, get rid of all the erroneous paragraph marks appearing between lines of the same paragraph, which should not be there (this often occurs with Word files made from scans, or worse, Word files made from "convert your file from PDF!"-type websites, or output from Adobe Acrobat), and secondly, you need to convert your paragraphs to first-line indent by using Word's built-in Styles feature, so you can lose that wasted line of whitespace between paragraphs.

HTH. The problem is in the manuscript, as near as I can tell, and I've seen a LOT of them.

Hitch

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, honestly:

Neither is right. [...]

You might be making a Smashwords mistake here, Hitch: assuming that just because the text isn't presented the way you want, that it's not presented as the author wanted. (Sorry, I couldn't resist. )

More seriously, yes I agree that the even second example doesn't look right, but since it was placed under a heading of "Instead of looking like This" I assumed that must have been what they wanted it to look like ... obviously such assumptions are not entirely safe.

[Anna Drake]

Oh, ugh. Your post takes me back. I had similar problems with my first Kindle upload. I finally solved it by converting the doc to HTML and manually inserting begin paragraph HTML marks and end paragraph marks throughout the entire document.

Anyway, since I never want to go through that again, I've been looking for ways to keep the process simple. And as the original poster suggested, that lies in formatting the original document correctly. If you manage that, you should be able to upload the doc without doing conversions through other programs.

The advice I've found helpful is to go into Paragraph, then Line Spacing Options, and Indentation, Special, Line Spacing Options, and set it at 0.20." Then as you write, each paragraph is automatically indented. Trust me, setting this up correctly in the first place is much easier than going in HTML and inserting all those paragraph marks.

I would think that by highlighting your paragraphs, perhaps by individual chapters, and applying the above paragraph settings you may be able to straighten out the errors. Also, there's Mark Coker's advice for setting paragraphs which is to use the little arrow thing on the ruler. Anyway, I think if you can produce a clean doc copy, your upload to Kindle should go okay.

I do wish you luck. My efforts to clean up my original smudged copy nearly drove me mad. But my copy was corrupted because I'd lost my original version of the novel when my computer crashed. So there's another warning. Always keep a back up copy of your work.

Anyway, good luck!

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by gmw

You might be making a Smashwords mistake here, Hitch: assuming that just because the text isn't presented the way you want, that it's not presented as the author wanted. (Sorry, I couldn't resist. )

More seriously, yes I agree that the even second example doesn't look right, but since it was placed under a heading of "Instead of looking like This" I assumed that must have been what they wanted it to look like ... obviously such assumptions are not entirely safe.

;-)

Yes, but I was actually assuming that the poster didn't deliberately have broken paragraphs, or that each line was supposed to stand alone like that in what, in the second example, seemed to be intended to be paragraphs. I also assume--and this is a big assumption, because some folks are just MARRIED to block paragraphs--that s/he wanted to create the book like the vast majority of reading material, not web material, and in accordance with Amazon's guidelines, which is first-line indented, not block-style. I absolutely could be wrong on both fronts.

Hitch

[VydorScope]

Originally Posted by MevagisseyMedic

Hi I am having problems with converting a Book in Word to MOBI
When converted to MOBI the text in the book looks like this with no paragraph gaps and text staggered on each line.


Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.
He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.

Instead of looking like This

Harry slowly raised his head and stared morosely at the familiar visage of number four,
What had already been a horrible day was rapidly getting worse.
Not only did he have to appear unannounced on the’ doorstep something he knew they’d have no problem expressing their displeasure over),
but he’d also have to tell them that two other freaks would be joining him this afternoon.
The corner of mouth twitched humourlessly as he envisioned how they’d take the news.

He’d left and at a little over an hour ago.
They were each going to make quick stops at their respective homes before.
Harry smiled fondly, remembering their show of solidarity.
He hadn’t been expecting it; he’d thought he’d be going on alone.
Although he was desperately worried about them and the remainder of their quest,
he had to admit that the thought of some support while facing his relatives was quite nice indeed.


Help Please

What are you using to make the mobi? If you are using Calibri - then that is an option in the conversion (to insert or remove the line between paragraphs). It does not matter what you do with the source file if Calibri is set to remove that line. I am sure other tools also have that same setting.

[HarryT]

The tool is called "Calibre", not "Calibri".

[VydorScope]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The tool is called "Calibre", not "Calibri".

Sure if you want to spell it right....

[gmw]

Originally Posted by VydorScope

Sure if you want to spell it right....

I thought you must have been using the plural form.

[DiapDealer]

And technically, it's calibre.