Chapter 8 Adding Images

Adding images is for sure the most little understood aspect of Kindle formatting, and that is understandable as the new Kindle Guide bows to those who INSIST on doing so directly in Word, as opposed to the earlier Guide which gave the correct manner via the img src=... tag in html file [exactly as one does for a web page].

So here is a REPEAT of the correct way, avoiding all those ppi and dpi Blues.

 Chapter 8

Images

We now turn our attention to any changes in The Bible on Word to Kindle - Book 2 and as for Book 1 most of the advice is still current, especially the advice to simply use a “placemarker” in Word and insert the standard code into the resultant html file.

However, as seen above, tags such as <center> no longer work, so we need to once again build a New Style to house our placemarker.

Here is a screen shot of such a Style called “image”.

And here is a screen shot of how this would look in Word.

And a screen shot from NotePad++ to show the highlighted text that has been changed from “Image..” in the html file.

In this case we want a page break before every image, so same as for Heading 1 we have built it into the Style itself. Obviously that may not always be the case (eg with photos) so you might make 2 different Styles for images – one with a page break and one without.

The reason in this case is the images are all gifs and are cropped to an exact width in order to show the detail in screen shots from Word. The problem is that Kindle can do some “clever acts” via scaling, and one is highlighted in our blogspot at Amazon Kindle has Unbelievable Tekkers.

Hopefully that issue can be controlled by using a page break before each image, but remember Amazon is continually “changing the rules” on how the final product is rendered from device to device, but rarely tells us, so always check your final product on ALL devices, as described below.

As an aside, it is often inferred that Kindle for PC is not a “real” device and therefore it matters not how a book might be rendered on Kindle for PC (affectionately known as KFC) and in fact the “9 Shades of Scaling” reported in the blog above does not happen on a “normal” Kindle.

But the user statistics say that 50% of all reading of Kindle Books IS on KFC. Then one needs to understand that KFC has always been in color and has always been able to link to a website (eg Utube). It would seem that the proof of this aspect is that there is no such thing as “Fire for PC”.

An unfortunate consequence of all this is that in such a case as this book where we use a page break before all the screen shot images to ensure they are not scaled, THAT is rendered on some Kindle devices as being a DOUBLE page break, hence a blank page.

But there is really no issue because the ONLY logical way to use this book is ON a PC, with the book in one Window on KFC and Word open in another Window to actually execute the steps in the book. One would not normally be reading this book as a bedtime story at a ski resort.

Doing a Redux

This tip is not in the book but is additional information along the lines of Nuking.

A Redux is the total opposite of a Nuke because you have a Source document that has been painstakingly formatted [for PRINT or "print to" pdf] but is not in an App that is Kindle friendly.  So we want to RETAIN that formatting as much as possible, ie not just italics, bolding etc but actual STYLES.

As we saw in the last post, the Paste INTO Word is the Key to what you are going to get to after your Nuke or Redux.

Here is an image where the two Pastes are displayed on the one screenshot so you can compare the possibilities.  The upper one is the Redux.

Notice that Word has looked at what had been Copied in selecting your Pasting options.  In the lower case the copy was from a WordPad file, and as WordPad [rtf] does not HAVE styles, Word did not offer that option.

In the upper Paste the Copy was from a Word2 document [circa 1992] that was perfectly formatted but could not be saved as html as html had yet to be invented in a commercial form.  But the Options do in fact recognize those Styles in the Copy [Source] doc.

There are obviously many Options to be investigated here and in this case the Default Option was that ALL the formatting from the Copy doc got Pasted to the Word 2003 file.

This was a legal format book and used Normal Style as non-indented but with a Word numbering system.  Then there were 2 more sub levels of paragraphs, in italics and with 1 cm and 1.5 cm indent.  I made new Styles of s1 and s2 for these, AND they got translated exactly as built in Word2.

Had I needed to "do a Smashwords" and start from scratch on this book the stats say

• Normal Style -  2278 instances
• Heading 1 - 10 instances
• Heading 2 - 113 instances
• s1 - 916 instances
• s2 - 242 instances

A mammoth job indeed but as it was the book was published in just a few minutes after asking the Word TOC macro to build a TOC based on these 2 Levels of Headings.

So all that remains is the question of how this RENDERS on the various devices, ie IS the legal layout replicated correctly [it certainly was NOT prior to the 2012 updates to the Kindle System].

Here is the Kindle Previewer for the Fire Device.



And the original formatting comes up perfectly.  For Paperwhite it seems the same.



And for Kindle for PC:



The same result.

I would have been quite happy with that even though KindleDX [and normal Kindle] treated both s1 and s2 the same AND reverted to old "Kindle Indent" for first line, per:



But that seemed to be an aberration of the latest Previewer 2.71 because once purchased and viewed on my Kindle it was same as we see above for Fire, so 100% success.

So I would urge people to further explore what is possible with the Options under the Paste button, as it seems REDUX has a lot to offer, AND all of this is using the stock standard [albeit improved] formatting method, ie NOT KF8.

By the way here is the [print to pdf] layout as this book appears if purchased as a [pre-Kindle] e-book