Hey guys, I've taken the decision to publish an eBook however according to the amazon kindle info their system doesn't accept tabs and I will need to reformat to idents. Unfortunately my MS Word manuscript has 114k words with a crap load of tabs, with hindsight the indent option would have been sensible to take, however I now find myself with a time consuming problem and need some advice from an amazon ebook user and publisher. My question is if I set by tabs to zero and then implement the indent for all paragraphs in the document will this create an issue when publishing using amazon's kindle publishing tool? There will be a couple of thousand invisible tabs, will this be okay or should i just bite the proverbial bullet and go through the whole thing and get rid of the tabs one at a painstaking time? Rob
I think you should be able to select the entire document and then adjust the margins to automatically adjust all your paragraphs to indent by themselves. As for removing the tabs, simply search and replace. I'm not 100% on this, so my advice is to save as your file and rename it as "test" or some such, and then try this out. I've not tried to publish on Amazon before, so I might be talking nonsense. Does Amazon accept PDFs? You could convert your Word file into a PDF, transferring it into a kind of image. What formats does Amazon accept? You could also convert it into MOBI or ePUB by yourself via Calibre or the MobiPocket Creator. MOBI is a format that Kindle reads. MobiPocket converts the files into PRC, which is also readable by Kindles.
Worst comes to worst, export to text, globally delete tab characters, then import the yexy into a new document. Always keep older drafts anyway. If that's already your habit, you really lose nothing no matter how you botch it.
I go with the idea of Search and Replace, using the special character of ^t for finding the tabs, and replace with a null string "" (basically leave the replace text box empty). However, this would replace ALL tabs, not just those at the beginning of a paragraph. Once done, you can then use a style for the paragraphs and set the indents within that.
Thanks guys Hi guys thanks for all your suggestions, love the find and replace idea - didn't know you could do that. I tried to find using the special character ^t but it didn't pick them up for some reason. So instead I went to tools and then options and then view and selected tabs on the formatting marks, this gave me a little arrow on my text, I then copied this and pasted it in the find box and it gave me a blank tabbed space which allowed me to replace with nothing, got rid of over 3 thousand of the little blighters! Also thanks for the ideas about the other formats - i'll have to check these out. You've just saved me A LOT of time so much appreciated and many thanks again Rob
have you tried 'selecting' [highlighting] the entire document, moving both margin-setting arrows to the far left margin, then moving the top one [sets the indent] to the proper .5" spot?... that may correct your problem...
