Pages to Word to Kindle problems

I'm trying to publish a book on Kindle, but I'm running in lots of trouble because I'm writing in Pages.

The preferred Kindle (KDP Amazon) method is using Mobi Creator but apparently Mac doesn't work with mobi; next best is using MS Word, compressing a Word .doc file with imbedded images and uploading that. And there's the problem because when I go from a Pages file to a Word .doc file, but I'm losing images, fonts are changing and text formatting is getting messed up. The "worst" format by Kindle standards is .pdf file because their conversion really doesn't work very well with it. Then it is further messed up using Mac OS file compression which apparently changes some coding compared to Windows "zip" compression but that's another issue.

Question #1: Is there any way to set up Pages to "save-as" or "export" into a Word file and keep all the formatting?

Question #2 : Since Pages doesn't support a "view source" function (unless I'm missing it?) , is there any way to see the formatting to double-check the conversion?

Brian Lawson

Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jun 10, 2011 12:39 AM

Feb 23, 2013 6:20 AM in response to CHEETERLY

Sorry, Cheeterly, I can't be of more help there. I have never worked with illustrations. It can be done on Kindle, but I am not the one to tell you how. I recommend a search in the KDP forums. Questions along those lines come up quite regularly. One thing you should remember, however, is that, of all the various incarnations of Kindle on sale, only the Kindle Fire will display your illustrations in colour. That is because it is not all that closely related to the other Kindles, but is really a rather specialised Android tablet. I have no expertise with CS6.

As for Pages, I defined my own templates for the 'Master' and 'Trim' copies (I have another for the CreateSpace paperback issues of my books). These consist of a generic cover page, where the title is listed, imaginatively, as 'Title', and a body text page, which just has the margins, first line indent, font and line spacing preset. These are saved as templates, using the 'Save as Template' command in the File menu. When I start a new book, I open the appropriate template, replace the word, 'Title' with the actual title and immediately save it, under its new name, to the Books folder in my documents before Mountain Lion can automatically save it back to the templates under its new name. I then close the templates and open the newly-renamed book file to work on it.

I do not use text boxes. I just type between the margins. I can imagine text boxes being used when you wish to flow text around an illustration, but that might be frought with difficulties on a Kindle because ebook readers do not use conventional pages. Instead, think of an ebook as a sort of flattened out continuous scroll, which appears to the reader a screenful at a time. People who suffer from weak eyesight can also enlarge the text, which plays havoc with any formatting you have put in. Apparently there are ways of doing it, but I don't know what they are. Generally speaking, Kindle books benefit from a bare minimum of formatting. The simpler the better. Hope this helps.