

- #ACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS MICROSOFT WORD FOR KINDLE MAC GENERATOR#
- #ACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS MICROSOFT WORD FOR KINDLE MAC PC#
We now also have a video guide to help you to format your ebooks for Kindle or Smashwords.Microsoft Word’s automatic table of contents generator relies on styles, which are special formats you apply to your document so that Word knows which parts of your text are headings, subheadings, paragraphs, and so on. Therefore, the first step to automatically generating a table of contents is to make sure that your document has the appropriate styles applied. Then you will find that getting your ebook approved is easy. You then copy it back into a new Word file and start the entire formatting process from scratch using Word styles.
#ACTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS MICROSOFT WORD FOR KINDLE MAC PC#
You can do this by using Notepad for PC and Textedit for Mac. It means that you copy and convert your whole Microsoft Word doc file to plain text. The best approach I have found is to take what Smashwords calls the ‘ Nuclear‘ approach. Inserting page breaks will start each chapter on a new page. When formatting chapters, you should avoid line breaks in your text, but you can add page breaks between chapters. You pay little attention to formatting when you are in the process of writing. The fact that a book takes a long time to write creates most of the problems. The most important point about creating an ebook file in Word is maintaining consistency throughout the whole document. It is the ideal setting for an ebook file. In the image above, you can see that first line indent is used to create paragraphs with no line spacing before and after a line. So leave the thought of beautiful typography out of your thinking.

I know many authors who get a little upset about not having a line space between paragraphs, but this is an ebook and not a book.īooks do not change size and shape, but ebooks do.

The best method to achieve this is to eliminate paragraph and line breaks.

Paragraph SettingsĪlso, reading an ebook on different screen sizes from a smartphone to a tablet needs fluid text. Just think about what happens when you read an ebook in landscape or portrait mode and how the text changes and flows. Paragraphs cause many problemsĪn ebook needs to be flexible with text, line length, and paragraphs. New Times Roman is a good choice for ebooks. You should only use Heading1 for your book title.īut make sure all of them are using the same font. You would use Normal for your body text and Heading 2 for your chapter titles. Stick to the basic ones such as Normal, Heading 1, and Heading 2. This help page from Microsoft gives a useful basic guide to using styles. It is the area that causes the most errors in a document. Then I can be sure that the ebook will be perfect on Kindle as well. I now have the habit of preparing a new book for Smashwords first and then publishing it to KDP. It is why you need to change your thinking from merely producing a Word document to producing an ebook file.Ī well-formatted ebook file will appear exactly the same in any ebook format, including Kindle, RTF, and epub files. When publishing with Smashwords, your ebook file needs to be suitable for nine different ebook formats, not just one. You can avoid all of these problems by formatting your ebook correctly before you start uploading and publishing. It is extremely annoying when fonts, line spacing, and paragraph formatting change, and page breaks create unwanted blank pages, or the table of contents is incorrect. I have read many Kindle ebooks that have suffered from this problem. The problem with this is that any poor formatting that is inherent in your document will affect the quality of your ebook. Kindle converts your file to its proprietary ebook format, and as long as your text fits on the screen, you will pass. For authors who are used to using Kindle Direct Publishing, it often comes as a surprise that the file you uploaded to KDP is unsuitable for other formats.
