Formatting & Layout Issues After Conversion

[AndyAitch]

Hi Folks,

I have a couple of issues that may or may not be 'actual issue', and perhaps just the way things are, i.e., I'm not getting any errors, and conversion appears to work seamlessly. But I may as well ask just in case there's a workaround.

Justified Headings

I have a word doc saved as Web Page, Filtered. The headings are set in MS Word 2010 to be left aligned. However, after converting the file to .mobi, the headlines are justified, and sometimes they appear gappy as a result. My text justification in Calibre is set to 'Original' so I'm not sure why the output file is giving me justified headings? I can align-left other paragraph text within the document, and that stays left, but not so the headers.

Extra Indent in Ordered List

The second issue is regarding lists. For some reason, when there is more than one line of text on the last item in the list, that line seems to indent by one space. I've searched online for a couple of days now, but not had any luck. It was suggested I post to this forum, so if anyone can help that would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Andy

[BetterRed]

@AndyAitch - Can I suggest you look at the support for DOCX that was recently added to Calibre - my experience in converting to ePUB is that it's considerably better than Filtered HTML, RTF etc. I think it will address address both of your issues - caveat I mainly convert to ePUB.

There's a sample document here http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conv...-specific-tips that provides some guidelines.

BR

[AndyAitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@AndyAitch - Can I suggest you look at the support for DOCX that was recently added to Calibre - my experience in converting to ePUB is that it's considerably better than Filtered HTML, RTF etc. I think it will address address both of your issues - caveat I mainly convert to ePUB.

There's a sample document here http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conv...-specific-tips that provides some guidelines.

BR

Thanks for your response BetterRed. I'll give it a go and see how things turn out. Btw, I'm converting for Kindle, so can I assume that ePUB is an acceptable format? The reason I ask is because I've got quite a lot of Kindle books, but going through them, they all seem to be either .mobi or AZW formats, and nothing in my collection is ePUB.

Thanks once again, I appreciate your response, and will update the forum once I've tried the suggestion.

Andy

[kovidgoyal]

If you want to convert for Kindle, you need to convert to AZW3

[AndyAitch]

Okay, here's a quick update on this issues.

The .docx to ePUB worked with left aligning the H1 and H2 headlines (thanks BR ). It also fixed the indent issue in lists, but only on the Calibre eBook viewer. When viewing the file on the Kindle Desktop viewer, that problem still remains.

I then converted the file from The .docx to AZW3. This gave similar results to ePUB, but for some reason would not left align the H2 headers.

I will continue to look for a resolve tomorrow by trying and testing, and report back here if I find any solutions. In the mean time, if anyone has any other suggestions, or can just confirm whether this is something that everyone has to settle for, then please update this thread.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy

[AndyAitch]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you want to convert for Kindle, you need to convert to AZW3

Thanks kovidgoyal,

Yes I found that out after trying to open the ePub file on my device Thanks for the update though, we live and learn, as the saying goes.

Andy

[AndyAitch]

Hi Folks,

Okay, I found the solution to my problems. The .docx to AZW3 format fixes all my issues. The reason for some of the problems with this conversion were because the book I'm trying to format has been copied from my friend's website and directly pasted into MS Word, bringing with it all kinds of weird formatting issues. I didn't know this yesterday.

What I've been doing since is stripping out all the HTML by first pasting the text into Notepad, and then into the clean Word document.

The bad news is that I've just read that not all Kindle devices can read files converted to AZW3 format, so that means I'll have to go back to square one and try to work with .mobi It's all very fiddly, a bit like the 'squeezing the balloon' effect, unless of course I'm doing something wrong? It's a shame, because the AZW3 gave the perfect results, but if some Kindle devices can't read it, then I guess the book can't really go on sale in the Amazon store.

Any advice or suggestions from those more savvy than I, are much appreciated.

Andy

[BetterRed]

@AndyAitch - have you tried converting the DOCX to MOBI, I just converted a couple of my DOCX's to MOBI and viewed them with Mobipocket Reader.

My bullets, numbered lists, header & strapline formats were all good

There's a minor glitch with underlined, bold, small caps (which may be the viewer preferences), otherwise they look great - dare I say better than my ePUBS - but again that's probably a viewer preferences issue.

BR

[AndyAitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@AndyAitch - have you tried converting the DOCX to MOBI, I just converted a couple of my DOCX's to MOBI and viewed them with Mobipocket Reader.

My bullets, numbered lists, header & strapline formats were all good

There's a minor glitch with underlined, bold, small caps (which may be the viewer preferences), otherwise they look great - dare I say better than my ePUBS - but again that's probably a viewer preferences issue.

BR

Thanks for your feedback BR.

Yes I have tried DOCX to MOBI, but there's still lots of misalignment issues with lists when viewing on a Kindle device. Furthermore, I've been reading that the Amazon Kindle store now only accepts books that have been converted by KindleGen or by them. However, when I attempt to convert using KindleGen, the fonts are so tiny they're almost impossible to see without changing the setting to the largest font available. And when I email the file to Amazon for conversion, it comes back with the AZW3 file extension (and still has misaligned lists), but then I can't see how the book will look in .mobi, which I'm assuming is still the most common reading format?

converting a Word document for Kindle is certainly a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, that's for sure. I'll have another play around today before throwing in the towel

Thanks once again BR

Andy

[BetterRed]

I'm sure there will someone here who can give you good advice, maybe in the Kindle Formats forum ==>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=168

Sorry I could not help more

BR

[AndyAitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I'm sure there will someone here who can give you good advice, maybe in the Kindle Formats forum ==>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=168

Sorry I could not help more

BR

Appreciate your input BR I've done little more than look for a fixes these past six hours, and it seems the problem is not unique to me. However, there doesn't seem to be a simple resolve and there are many different and somewhat manual suggestions to try. I'll keep on tying and testing until the end of today, and see what comes of it all.

Cheers for now,

Andy