: Re: HTML Formatting for ebook I uploaded my short story on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) yesterday. All went well and I am excited, given this is my first attempt to publish anything! I did some

@Kristi637

Vote Up Vote Down

MS Word brings a lot of trash along, when converted to HTML. By trash, I mean unnecessary formating tags and styles that can mess your content if you decide to change it in the future. I won't give much more details but MS Word was design to create Doc files, not HTML. If you need something else than Doc files, Word is probably not for you.

HTML is extremely easy for basic documents like a 3 pages text, but it has its learning curve. Besides, HTML will split content from formatting, and that means that you will probably need to learn a few more things to do small funky things like add extra space after a paragraph.

Again, it's not hard. Anybody can learn basic HTML without any problems but it has its learning curve. Of course, HTML was not exactly designed to book writing so I don't think you will enjoy to write using HTML without a visual editor.

What I suggest is: use Markdown and Pandoc if you really intent to write ebooks.

Markdown is extremely simple. I'm using it right now to write this answer and it was designed to create a text that could be read almost in the same way by a render software and by a human. Also, it's plain text what means that can be edited in any text editor.

Using Pandoc, you will be able to compile (aka export) your markdown file into almost anything you want: DOC, HTML, PDF, LATEX,... And the code Pandoc generate is way cleaner than MS Word.

So, you asked if there was anything you are not doing in terms of formatting my document in HTML, and the answer is: there's so many trash in a HTML document generated from MS Word that it would be hard to tell.

You want to write eBooks, use proper eBooks tools. MS Word is a wonderful software, I just don't think it's the right tool to create web content.

(0)

Login to post a comment!