Converting from Word

[Craig223]

I’ve taken the plunge and started trying to convert a booklet to an e-Book. I Googled and read various things before starting. I decided to go with one of the recommended methods I came across, which involved using Word and Calibre.

So first I copied and pasted my entire booklet into a new Word document. Then I deleted all formatting and images. Then I brought back the formatting and images selectively, in whatever ways I’d read e-Books are best able to handle. Then I used Calibre to convert the Word document to an e-Book.

The result was not a disaster, but it does need some tinkering at least. Among the issues are these:

1. I didn’t use actual bulleted lists, because I’d read that’s a kind of formatting that won’t transfer over properly. To create quasi-bulleted lists, I used a space-dash-space at the start of each item. They were formatted with no indent on the first line, and a small hanging indent on subsequent lines.

The way this came out in the e-Book created with Calibre, the first line of each item is indented it looks like double what the subsequent lines are, and then those other lines are indented the correct amount. So it got the hanging indent right, but decided to add a big indent to the first lines that I didn’t want.

2. In Word, I made my images that I wanted to extend fully across the page the same size as the distance from the left to the right margin, and for those that I wanted to extend only halfway across, I sized them half as wide.

The way they came out in the e-Book, the images are tiny. The ones that were supposed to go all the way across go half or a little less, and the ones that were supposed to go halfway across look like they go maybe 20%-25% of the way across.

I did a little more research and read that for something you intend to convert to an e-Book, it’s better to use pixels or points as a unit of measurement instead of inches. It suggested 600 pixels wide for an image to go all the way from left margin to right margin. I checked the images in my Word document, and expressed in pixels the ones that go across the whole page are at or about 480 pixels, and the ones that cover half the page are at or about 240 pixels.

So I could bump that up to 600 and 300 respectively, but it seems like I need to do more than that. It seems like I need to at least double their size.

Maybe I should just go back and forth through trial and error until I hit on a size that, when converted, is what I want. But then again I keep reading how every e-Book reader is different, so I don’t know how much it even matters to get the images to display at the desired size in the Calibre reader if they can be completely different in another reader.

As I look through it, it looks like there are some other little things that may not have transferred over correctly when I converted it via Calibre, but those are the main things that stand out so far:

1. Telling Calibre that I want certain material to have no indent in the first line of each paragraph, and a hanging indent in subsequent lines, and

2. Formatting images in a way such that they’ll be in the same proportion to the page in the e-Book as they are in Word.

[itimpi]

You do not mention what eBook format you are primarily targeting. This matters as each format tends to have different restrictions on exactly what is supported when formatting. You are unlikely to find Word formatting always translating to the exact same formatting in all eBook formats.

If by any chance the target format is ePub then you might be better off using Sigil as he editing tool as it is ePub aware.

[Craig223]

Sorry, yes it was ePub that I converted it to with Calibre.

[BetterRed]

@Craig223 - what file type are saving in Word - DOCX, DOC, RTF

If you can (i.e. you have Word 2007 or later) then I would recommend you save as DOCX and Add that to Calibre, Support for DOCX was recently added to Calibre - my experience is that it is excellent.

See http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conv...-specific-tips, that link has a sample docx file that documents the Word features that Calibre supports

BR

[DoctorOhh]

Psuedo lists won't do, as you found out they'll be treated as paragraphs. Try actual lists.

[Craig223]

It's Word 2003.

I saved it as "Web Page," which I think makes it HTML.

[Craig223]

As an experiment I took a page from my document that had a quasi-bulleted list, changed it to a regular bulleted list using Word, saved it as "Web Page" and converted it with Calibre to ePub. It looks pretty much like it's supposed to.

So I should be able to solve that issue now by going back through my document, finding all the quasi-bulleted lists (that I so painstakingly created since I've read in multiple places that you have to strip out any even halfway complex formatting that some other software creates since it'll get totally screwed up when you try to convert it to an eBook), and just making them regular bulleted lists.

What's the proper width of a Word document that you intend to turn into an eBook? And how then do you size an image to take up that whole width, or some specific percentage of it?