Re: Does anyone have experience converting a book manuscript from Word to Kindle?

[Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca>]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Dixie Lang <dlang -at- terracom -dot- net> wrote:
> Before I explain more, yes, I do realize Word is not a solid choice for
> manuscripts. At the moment I am stuck with it in Word.

Dixie, don't ever apologize for using Word. There are reasons why we
continue to put up with its foibles: more often than not, problems are
fixable. Word is easy to use, with known issues and workarounds that
we learn to accept.

> I then went back to digging up what I could find on the Web about Kindle
> conversions.  Much of the information is contradictory.  Some people
> recommended hand-coding the manuscript in HTML.

That said, how much work do you want to do to convert the doc(x/m)
into epub? Eliot Kimber of Really Strategies released his DITA 4
Publishers transform. It is a plugin for the DITA Open Toolkit that
generates output in the required electronic publishing formats (epub,
kindle, InDesign, etc). (By default, DITA exports to PDF and a variety
of HTML formats.) It also includes a Word to DITA transform.

http://dita4publishers.sourceforge.net/

The catch is you need to be willing to learn the DITA Open Toolkit.

> If anyone has done such a conversion, would you be willing to share best
> practices?  I am particularly interested in:
>
> - settings in Word to output the HTML as cleanly as possible
> - "clean up" scripts to remove Word's special formatting codes and
> streamline the HTML

I haven't used the conversion scripts (yet) but plan to test the
system out when I find an opportunity to do so. This plugin provides
an interface to map styles from Word to XML.

-Tony
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