Kindle Formatting – How to Convert a Document to HTML

You’ve written a great article, a short story, a novel that’s made you drink more coffee and sleep less than you did when you were studying for your college finals, and now you can’t load it on your Kindle because it’s not in HTML format. Don’t you love it when that happens? The problem doesn’t come with the conversion itself, if you know how to do it, that is. But if you have no idea how you’re going to make this happen and have to spend a few more sleepless nights to pull it off, chances are your sweet self will turn into the Incredible Hulk after a short while. . There are different ways to convert your documents to HTML. Everything will depend on the format you use to write. So, let’s start with converting from Word to HTML, then I’ll talk about converting from PDF format.

1. FIND YOUR DOCUMENT- from the File menu that you will see in Microsoft Word, select your saved document and open it, you cannot do a conversion with it closed even if you have selected it, so keep this in mind.

2. UPDATE YOUR DOCUMENT- Not all of the content you’ve put into your Word file will appear in HTML. It is better to skip the numbers and some pictures. Once you’ve removed these things, you need to save your document again.

3. CONVERT IT – When you save your document now, go to File, click Save As and you’ll get the option to save as web page or Save as HTML. You can select any of them and click Save. Now, open a web page and go to your document file, select this document to open it, it will open it in HTML format.

For PDF formats, I suggest first saving them in Word and then converting them to HTML format, but you can also save these documents as HTML using Acrobat Professional.

Now that you’ve saved your document as HTML, you’ll need to clean up the code. Formatting in an HTML document is marked by tags, which are text enclosed in angle brackets, for example, is a tag found in HTML formats. The language used in HTML is quite simple once you get the hang of it. It would be a good idea to get a tutorial guide to help you learn HTML coding.

4. DOCUMENT FORMAT: The Kindle does not support the use of margins in the ways you may be used to. I suggest you use a style sheet to format your book, and don’t forget to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as much as you can. Unfortunately, some CSS rules are not supported or only minimally supported on the Kindle: most have to do with margins and fonts. The best control over font sizes can be achieved using header tags:

Use custom tags to mark page breaks in text. Try to include one in front of each chapter of your book.

Now that your book has been formatted, preview it by uploading it before publishing to see how it looks.