Quote:
Originally Posted by cHex
My problem with Word is it leaves all kinds of extraneous code. I just hate the mess. I'm trying out SeaMonkey, let's see how that goes.
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I am the same way about messy code as I use to be a web designer back in the old days. It really doesn't matter with Kindle books. I have found most retail books were made using Word. If it was a webpage you were designing it would be different. You would want the code optimize but this is an ebook not a webpage. Messy code or clean code doesn't change anything once it's on the Kindle. It displays the same with no speed change.
Once you import it in Calibre, Calibre will clean it up alot and change it to it's own code anyway. So it really doesn't make a difference what you use to make your Book.
Book Designer 5 works well but You have a few shortfalls. You will need to clean the code up in notepad2 before importing into Calibre. I use it still sometimes when I need styles removed and converted to it's html entities. I do recommend if you use BD5 to get the Book Cleaner files here or you will loose your emdashes. I usually open the file up and replace the DIV tags with paragraph tags. Remove the Justification it uses before importing into Calibre.
I buy alot of backlist titles from Smashwords and Amazon and I have to fix them up before I read them on my Kindle.
These are the tools I use most. Word 2003, Notepad2, Book Designer 5 and of course Calibre for converting. Sometimes I use Mobipocket Creator if I am dealing with a very stubborn PDF file and Acrobat can't convert it to html. I then take the html file and clean it up in either Word or BD5 before using Calibre to convert it.