This is formatting guide by Guido Henkel. You can get some amazing […]. Pingback by To Hire or Not to Hire? Formatters Tani Mura's Blog on August 9, at Guido Henkel has an excellent, detailed, life-saving guide on how to do this. However, there are a few elements that I feel were missed. If you have another HTML creation program, this will work just as well.
However, I have added […]. Comment by Misty Spears on September 30, at Of course, I have to hope everyone sees it the same way I do. Pingback by Adventures in Formatting Part 1: No coubt I would have already hurled myself from my 5th floor flat window by now so, you could say you have saved a life … hehe! Anyway, down to business. Is it neccessary to put commas, full stops, question marks, hyphens, colons and semi-colons into HTML?
Davey, general punctuation does not need to be converted into entities. You can freely use things such as question marks, commas, periods, colons, etc. Comment by Davey Northcott on January 16, at 1: Comment by Davey Northcott on January 18, at The section before it is in italics and should be, and after this section I have the symbol.
Any ideas as to what may be happening here? Question number 2 is this: Is there a limit on how much you can indent text? I have some lines where I would like to have every other line indented about 8. However, the maximum that it seems to indent the text is 3. Here is the code I am using:. Only a look at the actual code would allow me to see what is going on. As for indentation, no, there are no limits that I know of. It could be that Calibre is limiting it, however, the way it also limits font sizes to avoid excess. There is a switch somewhere, though, to turn that on and off in Calibre.
Having said that, an indentation of 8. Thanks for the tip. Comment by Davey Northcott on January 19, at 8: Just to let you know, after doing the above it seems to have solved the problem with the italics. I guess there was a rogue somewhere abouts! Thanks for the tips anyway. Grab a pen and paper… on January 30, at 7: Comment by Tasha on February 24, at I was wondering what is the disadvantage to embedding a font if you provide a generic fallback font like serif?
Reason I ask is that it seems as if Georgia is the default font for a lot of devices at least from using the kindle previewer and Georgia causes some numbers to go beneath the line e. Also, I thought the kindle fires had the options to change the font yet in the kindle previewer the only font available is Georgia for the fire line of devices. It seems to be the default for the kindle for Pc software too. Pingback by Ebook Formatting Woes: SL Huang on March 19, at The reason it was […]. It covers the aspects from this tutorial in a lot more detail and also adds a hole lot of additional info, details and advanced techniques to the mix.
Here is a link with a bit more info, including a look at the Table of Contents of the book. Comment by Mobi-ePub on June 30, at 9: I agree that the formatting of an eBook is one of the most important aspects. Being very pedantic, formatting errors can really ruin the reading experience for me. Thanks for this article! You may talk about this in your Zen book And do you have any advice moving from Bookemon to other outlets?
I just learned it all in a week thanks to Guido Henkel and J Thorn, two gentlemen who have created fine fine guides to formatting ebooks. I got your drift. Yet, another milestone in my writing career. I had a great writing instructor, the late, Louis Reyes Rivera. Errors glare at me from traditional books, not often, but glaring when they show up. I know absolutely nothing about eBook formatting. Just want to say thanks for your work, I do take pride in my work and I appreciate your input and guidance.
I began studying and tweaking today. It makes your book and brand look professional, and also […]. Hi Guido, Thanks so much for your site and its information. It has been encouraging and fun! I am an old guy trying to figure out how to provide the necessary html in order to make a work available as an ebook. Anyway, my first question is about JEdit. I followed all your steps through chapter VI, but I found myself getting stuck in opening the file in my web browser. I know you use text mate, but would you know how to open a file from JEdit into a web browser?
My second question stems from the first. After being unable to open the file from JEdit, I then transferred it back to MS Word despite your advice not to do so , with all the html included to account for headings, italics, etc. I saved the file as an. From there, I was lost, since I was unable to affect any of the changes to my documented as I should have been able to.
Can you help me with these questions? At any rate, I am still encouraged by the possibilities out there today, for the individual, and I am in part immensely thankful to you and your site. Thanks so much again, and. If you save the file with a. Thanks again for this and as a matter of fact my computer is now in the shop, at the time of this writing, so I suspect you were correct about there being something wrong with it….
Thank you so much for this series. I think if I just do the html files as you outline I will solve that problem so thank you! I hope I can contact you with any questions along the way.
Make your books, documentation and manuals readable on the move
Pingback by Best e-book formatting process? Having an extensive background in […]. Pingback by Best tool to create ebooks? He will walk you through all the details for making sure that your html file is […]. Pingback by Day Pingback by Adventures in Self-Pubbing: His blog outlines the process, but for the nitty-gritty, buy his book.
That entire process went off […]. Comment by Morris E Graham on April 30, at First of all, I want to thank you for this tutorial. Thanks for the kind words, Morris. Interesting that you mention this. What you are referring to is something that is more commonly used in Europe. I remember in my days as a typesetter in Germany, we always inserted a narrow space following quotation marks, and also set apart things, such as exclamation marks with some narrow spacing.
Day 7: Understand Amazon Kindle Formatting In 3 Minutes - Kindle Station
I would have to run some test, though, to confirm this. Unfortunately Amazon makes it a bit tricky for people who own the original to get the new one, but if you send them an email, it is my understanding that they will let you replace the version in your library with the updated one. The new version has been adapted to current developments and expands on various subjects to clarify and to accommodate new developments in eBook devices.
Click here to grab the book on Amazon! McGehee on June 14, at 5: And I love the title, BTW! In the print version of our book, there is a dedication and an epigraph each on a separate page and I want them to have the same top margin as the chapter headings. On the DX, the preview shows no formatting of the fonts on the title page at all, and then it takes the logo of the press which is just a small image on all the other devices, as it should be and makes it huge and puts it onto an entire page by itself…! Is there any way to make that top margin show on the dedication and epigraph pages?
And if the Kindle DX really is that goofy, is there some way to correct for that? I was wondering about the possibility of turning the entire title page into an image instead of text, in order to completely control the fonts and sizes, the way you did with the fancy chapter headings — would that work, or could it create other problems? Thank you so much for your kind words. Without looking at your actual code, it is hard to say why the top margin does not show in those pages.
As for the title page, yes, if you want full control, making the entire page an image would solve your problem, most likely. By that I mean that it is, as an example, not even possible to scale images. Depending on how the image is coded in your HTML, it will either always show up in its original source size or scaled to the size of the full page. Very little can be done about that, but fortunately these early Kindles do not seem to have much of a market penetration any more.
If you found the book helpful, please be so kind and leave a review on Amazon. It would mean a lot to me. Game of Sails, Take Two on June 16, at McGehee on July 4, at Hi Guido — I wanted to say thank you for your reply and let you know that I did post a review of the book. If there is no formatting in a document other than the basics that were copied and pasted directly out of your tutorial, how would you recommend putting a larger margin on a single page with something like a dedication?
Above the text there is a page break formatted like this: And the page break is working fine. When I submitted the comment, for some reason it took out the line showing how the page break is formatted. Thank you very much for the review, L. I truly appreciate it. McGehee on July 4, at 4: All of the other Kindles and the Android tablet and phone just ignore it.
Have you ever run into this problem before? Depending on how the HTML document is structured, yes, that can happen.
Try padding-top instead of margin-top. That usually does the trick in those cases. McGehee on July 11, at All of the devices ignore it completely! Do you have any other suggestions, or am I stuck with having to jury-rig the top margin by inserting the image of a blank space above the text? It just seem so odd that there would be no way to make it work with the standard formatting codes! This should not happen.
Something is wrong with your code. Comment by Morris E. Graham on August 8, at I was wondering if there is any way to use drop cap for a Kindle. This seems to be my white whale. Yes, there are ways to do this, but there are some limitations, depending on the Kindle model and firmware the book will be displayed on. In general there are two ways to do this. Either create a span around the initial character and then adjust the font properties in that span, or to use the first-letter pseudo-element.
Comment by Morris Graham on August 10, at 5: Can you show both examples of how to apply this code? I tried some that I found on the internet and basically wound up with one oversize letter on the first line and then it indented it to the second line to continue. Comment by Ski on August 31, at 1: I am using sublime text, and am wondering if things like comas, exclamation points and question marks need to be coded like quotes etc. I sure would appreciate your opinions. Standard punctuation marks do not need to be encoded specially, they are part of the standard ASCII character set.
Pingback by self publishing eleanor kos fiction on September 22, at 5: Hello, I just bought your book as a thanks for writing this amazing free guide.
How do I make title pages that look good? Also, this is regarding images: Storymedic, how to make title pages look good is really a matter of personal taste and design. There is little I can say on the subject. It is achieved like everything else in the eBooks using style settings to achieve whichever design you desire.
As for image sizes, there is a chapter on the subject in the book. There is no simple answer for it because of the many factors that play into it and the chapter in the book goes into a lot more detail about what thoughts should go in that particular decision process. It also depends, of course on exactly what it is that you are trying to do.
Your explanation was unfortunately not very clear on that. Graham on October 24, at 6: I am having trouble with being able to make large letters in my chapter headings and H1. Can I see the CSS script you use that really works? Graham on October 25, at 6: What am I doing wrong? Graham on October 26, at Okay to be clear.
What I am saying is this: This is the line I apply in the body. I also used to be able to put a paragraph break in my book to make it look nice when I needed it, by adding the following code below, but it no longer works on new books. Graham on October 26, at 2: Forget all the other questions. I bought your book.
I really want to use that wildcard command to format the paragraphs.
How to Make a Kindle eBook from Scratch
Graham on October 27, at 1: I see that you were meaning the editor, not word. You can delete all my questions as of late. Graham on November 1, at I read your book, and gave it a five-star review on Amazon. I loved it Most of all of my questions were answered.
Can you show me all of the code you sued to create that page, and also what the size of your picture was? Morris, vertical alignment is not possible in eBooks. It is really one of the most missed features for book design because it would dramatically help with page layout, even in free flowing books. The code looks like this. Finally, keep pages short. The Kindle cannot scroll; long Web pages are paginated like books.
Pagination with E Ink devices is slow relative to scrolling on a computer screen. The current version of the Kindle is broadcasting this user-agent: The next version of the Kindle is expected soon, no doubt with an improved browser. Indeed, Amazon could offer a new version of the existing browser at any time. Most of the changes recommended above should take little time and money to implement, and can make a great difference in user experience. In addition, optimizing your site for small-screen browsers can have other benefits: All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.
Tools of Change for Publishing. This web site presents useful information to us, keep it up. I spent some time looking for information. Keep your good work up. The method I described is for Amazon only.
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Living in Japan,the Cover Creator is not available at present. So I logged in the kindle site on the stateside. Thank you so much for this helpful blog article. It really helps so much! According to the KindleGen webpage: Can you suggest about listing justify ul and ol. I have not encountered that issue, but then again I seldom justify text. This is wonderful and lucid and clear, Alicia. Does it also work for an Arabic right-to-left ebook? Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines: I strongly recommend that you look at the samples.