Newbie questions

[RonNYC]

I have a book in docx format. I converted it to PDF. I've tried to convert it to MOBI and while it works, sort of, it's not good. Perhaps the converter I used are defective or old or my format isn't suitable. I have drop caps which end up appearing in the middle of the page and the font has changed.

Can Kindle viewers read PDF? Is there a downside? If there's a tutorial on this, please let me know.

Thanks.
RON

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by RonNYC

I have a book in docx format. I converted it to PDF.

If you use Calibre, convert the book to the new AZW3 format or select "both" as the MOBI file type on the Mobi output settings dialog box in Calibre. (If you plan to sell the book via Amazon KDP use KindleGen.)

Originally Posted by RonNYC

I have drop caps which end up appearing in the middle of the page and the font has changed.

The old .mobi format doesn't support dropcaps and embedded fonts, but the new AZW3 format does, however, you'll most likely have to tweak the dropcaps code for AZW3.

Originally Posted by RonNYC

Can Kindle viewers read PDF? Is there a downside?

Kindles can display .pdf files, but only display them well, if they have been optimized for 600x800 displays.

[susan_cassidy]

You can convert directly from docx to mobi format, using the Kindle email service, if you want. I don't know if Calibre handles it, but it might. You would probably have better results than trying to convert from a pdf file, anyway.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by RonNYC

I have a book in docx format. I converted it to PDF. I've tried to convert it to MOBI and while it works, sort of, it's not good. Perhaps the converter I used are defective or old or my format isn't suitable. I have drop caps which end up appearing in the middle of the page and the font has changed.

Can Kindle viewers read PDF? Is there a downside? If there's a tutorial on this, please let me know.

Thanks.
RON

Never, never, never convert from PDF to either ePUB or MOBI, if you have a source doc or docx file. If you have a plain fiction title, you can probably upload the Docx file at KDP and get a pretty competent mobi file.

I'd recommend that you try that first; download the Preview MOBI (Step 6) and see if it's what you want. If that works, you're home. If it doesn't, then you're going to need to make an ePUB (or use Jutoh or Atlantis Word Processor, each ~$40USD) and tweak the results until you get what you want.

You can try Calibre (docx -->MOBI) and see if that works, but as someone else here said, Amazon very often rejects Calibre-made mobis, and certainly will if you're using Dropcap styling, which means you need KF8 format, which Calibre can't support in a filetype that works at Amazon.

Never convert from PDF. I do this for a living, and in over 2,000 books, I've only seen one instance in which I asked the prospective client for the PDF over the source word-processed file, and that's only because the source word-processed file was SUCH a mess that cleaning it up would actually take us longer than it would to go through everything you have to go through to competently and completely convert a PDF into ePUB/MOBI formats. PDF is possibly the WORST input format for MOBI- or ePUB-making.

Hitch