Later on we will add a 100% width rule in the CSS to make sure your images fill the width of whatever device your book is being read on. Credit for this idea goes to ‘Chris_Mac_Artworker’. If you want image to be thumbnail size (a headshot, for example) then add a 300 pixel wide white background to the right of your 200 pixel wide image, for example. Don’t bother trying to flow text around an image. Import an image in a new paragraph (so after you’ve hit return). Images in Kindles should can be GIF, JPG or PNG, about 500 pixels wide and as small as possible. If you have images in your book import them in Sigil (Insert > File, Cmd/Ctrl-I) and write the alt text. You can weed out more unwanted HTML by scrolling through and using Sigil’s excellent validation tool. The above will get rid of 90% of the rubbish Word puts in your lovely ePub. Gets rid of unwanted styling after opening p tagĪnd here are the normal find and replaces (you can keep the Find/Replace mode in Sigil as “Regex”, you don’t have to put it back to “Normal”): Find Here are the regular expressions I find and replace (change the Find/Replace mode in Sigil to “Regex”): Find The above video shows you how I do the HTML cleaning and ePub creation in Sigil.
I owe a huge debt to Peter Clough of Get Publishing and the London Kindlers Meetup Group for putting me onto this. Even in a 10,000 word book this seems like a huge task but you can do it in a few minutes by using Regular Expressions. All the styles, spans, classes, divs, etc., have to go. You’ll then need to clean up the HTML further. (You could clean up the Word HTML before you enter it to Sigil with ) Using Regular Expressions in Sigil to clean up a Word doc There will be a bunch of crap in green that you’ll need to manually delete. You do, however, have to sort out the text and images in your e-book.Īs you can see in the above image, Sigil sorts out the beginning of the HTML:Īfter this, you should go straight into the of your first heading. You really don’t have to know about how all this works as Sigil has it covered. As you can see in the left hand pane, Sigil has created all the necessary files and folders for the ePub to successfully validate (and create an awesome Kindle Mobi). The above image shows a new ePub in Sigil with a Word document pasted in “Book view” and then switched to “Code view”. If you open up Sigil after installing it, it will immediately open up a “bare” ePub file (see below).
MOBI FILE CREATOR HOW TO
How to extract Word’s rubbish from an ePub and a Kindle Mobi with Sigil In order to get the Microsoft Word styles, click the Home tab to display the “ribbon” with all the basic formatting on it, you’ll be able to assign styles there by clicking buttons with text selected. Notice the is created by the Heading 1 style, the is created by the Heading 2 style and the is created by the Normal style.
This is how the above should be created in Microsoft Word. This is another normal paragraph in which you can have bolds and italics and links.Īnd, here's another paragraph coming up with an image in it. This is the sort of HTML you should be seeing in the body of your e-book: If you’re a complete HTML novice then don’t worry because it’s real simple. This is because e-books are completely accessible – the reader chooses the font, the color and the size of the text they want to read. What do I mean by that? I mean that there should be no font, color, text size or line height specified – hardly any styling, in fact. Then I discovered how to get rid of Microsoft Word’s rubbish from an ePub with Sigil (free software) and Regular Expressions (a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern).īy the way, Kindle’s Mobi format is almost the same as an ePub, so creating a perfect ePub with Sigil results in a perfect Mobi for Amazon’s Kindle.Į-books should have totally clean HTML. I’ve spend months pulling my hair out wrestling with this (I wasn’t bald before). However, your Kindle looks like a dog’s dinner because of the crap that Microsoft Word inadvertently puts into it: colors in headings, inexplicable font changes, the bullet points coming out smaller than the body text, too big, too small, you name it.
There’s no better feeling than putting your heart onto digital paper, uploading a Word file and have your book sold in the largest book store in the world.