Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
"Niggly?" That's because this Word file is patently not styled. It looks to my eyes that it's been done with ad hoc styles, with manual settings for each paragraph, etc. That's the only explanation for finding TWO different font settings in the same exported "style" and don't get me started about some of the rest.
Making ebooks, like making print books, is not a "take some text I typed and magically it's a book" process. I blame Amazon for part of this idea, floating around out there that it's insta-magic, no-effort-required, but I also blame Microsoft, for promulgating the idea that a word-processor is a simple one-size-fits-all magic software that can do all things and be all things to all people, from a simple word-processor to layout software to whatever.
I'm not saying that's how you think, but it's definitely how a lot of first-time author-"converters" think.
eBooks are HTML. Just like webpages. But, unlike webpages, they have a limited set of HTML that makes them "go" successfully. To make that happen, you either need to accept that the outcome will not be exactly as you wish, or you learn some html, and CSS, and how to do the job correctly--or at least, enough to fix what goes wrong.
If you don't think that you can take your Word file, push a button and have a working website, well, that doesn't work for an eBook, either.
IF--repeat, IF-you know and understand and use Word's Styles and headings, you can make a relatively decent book with very little understanding of HTML, because you put in all the work upfront--by using the styles. :-) If you didn't use those, and don't put in that work upfront, then you are doomed to do that work and heavy lifting in HTML.
Hitch
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Hitch,
I based the original document format on the Smashwords style guide where all extraneous formatting in Word is recommended to be removed and the 4 or 5 dedicated styles used were made in Word for quotes, bullet points and the Word defaults were ignored. So the original book document, of which the reproduced text is a sample chapter from the book accurately reflects the Word output including the styles I created as I am familiar with Word. I can assure you that at over 400 A4 pages, I put in a lot of work on formatting the Word document as required with no added stuff so it would render as well as possible. For the book, the Smashwords online reader reproduces the book exactly as formatted as looks great but their epub rendering does not.
However, it seems that I have not learnt enough and I can see from your own and others helpful comments that I still have some way to go on this! I will retry Calibre using a docx format straight to epub and check it out and perhaps acknowledge that I have to educate myself on html too. I also write quiz books under a pseudonym so this whole process will serve me well into the future.
Cheers,
Andy