Forsand, Norway is a beautiful vacation spot.

Here, is the binomial coefficient

Chapter 1

tags. Examples of this can be seen on page 110.

  Unfortunately, the shading and vertical size of the

---

tag cannot be adjusted.

  Comments

  Many times it is helpful to place a comment in your HTML code so that anyone looking at the code later will have a description of what you were doing. They can also be useful for labeling parts of the book in your code or marking places you need to remember to work on as you are formatting your file. Comments in HTML are placed in a special tag like this:

 

  These are never seen by the reader, and should only be used to make behind the scenes notes in the code.

  Page Breaks

  There are times when you will want to force some content to start on a new screen (“page”) in your book. These page breaks are not hard to format, but they require a special tag that is not actually HTML: . The “mbp” actually stands for “Mobipocket,” since the Kindle eBook format is based on the Mobipocket eBook format. You should place one of these page break tags in front of each chapter in your book, and possibly in front of other items, like images, which may need to be forced to the next page.

 

 

Chapter 1

  ..........

 

 

 

Forsand, Norway is a beautiful vacation spot.

  Microsoft Word inserts a page break like this:

 


  The effectiveness of that tag is not guaranteed, however, so I suggest you replace it with the tag.

  Special Characters and Inserting Symbols

  The Kindle format supports a wide variety of Unicode characters, including most Latin characters, (Basic Latin; Latin-1; Latin Extended A and B; and Latin Extended Additional); all of the Greek characters and pre-composed Greek characters with diacriticals (Greek and Greek Extended); a variety of mathematical symbols; as well as some arrows, musical notations, and Dingbat symbols. A complete list of the supported character sets can be found on page 155.

  To ensure that these characters display properly, you will need to convert them into HTML entities. An entity is a code that tells the Kindle what character to display in the text. Entities all start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). The interior text can be a name (é), a decimal number (é) or a hexadecimal number (é), but the name is usually easiest to remember. For instance, if you have the word “résumé” in your book, it can be coded like this in the HTML:

  résumé

  I have included a chart in Appendix C that gives you the valid codes for many of the common characters in the Latin-1 character set. In the Book Tools download section of my website I have included a printable list of all of the characters in the entire Latin range, the Greek and Greek pre-composed characters, and a selection of other common symbols that are supported on the Kindle. In that download you will also find a Perl script that you can run on your HTML file to convert the common Latin-1 characters into entities automatically.

  To find the characters in the Latin-1 character set manually in Windows, you can do a search in your HTML document using this Regular Expression:

  [€-ÿ]

  (Note: Due to a bug, this does not work in Notepad++ yet.) Those are the first (€) and last (ÿ) characters in the Latin-1 character range. To type those characters into the find box in your HTML editor program, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard and type the 4-digit number for the character using the number pad on your keyboard (not the numbers above the main keys): 0128 and 0255. Alternatively, you can use the Character Map utility that comes with Windows to copy these characters. That can be found in the Start Menu, under Programs, Accessories.

  Macintosh users have similar options for inserting Latin-1 characters, and OS X comes with a built-in character map of its own. However, you may find that characters 0128 and 0255 on your Mac do not look the same as what you see printed here.

  If you insert any special characters into your book, it is best to make the encoding of the file UTF-8, not ASCII. This is usually an option in the Save As menu of your text editor. Also, to ensure the Kindle properly formats the entities, be sure to but the UTF-8 meta tag at the top of your HTML:

 

  Foreign Languages

  The Kindle supports the use of Greek text, including the full range of pre-composed characters with diacritics, but it does not support any other non-Latin foreign language characters.

  To insert other languages in your text, you will need to use images. A height of 14-16 pixels is usually good when you are taking screen shots or creating images of text. See the images section on page 89 for information on formatting inline images.

  Non-breaking Spaces

  During conversion to HTML, Microsoft Word inserts some non-breaking spaces ( ,  , U+00A0;) where there are tabs in the original file. It will also sometimes place a non-breaking space and a regular space between sentences. While sometimes these non-breaking spaces do not actually cause problems, they can become problematic when they have been placed at the beginning of a paragraph to create indentation. For example:

 

There were two or three things that I wanted to know. I do not care about a mystery. So I began to inquire.

 

            It took me two weeks to find out what women carry in dress suit cases. And then I began to ask why a mattress is made in two pieces....

  In general, it is best to remove the non-breaking spaces that Word inserts. I usually change all of the non-breaking spaces in a Kindle HTML file into regular spaces, and then do a search to find all of the places where two or more spaces occur. That allows me to fix any weird formatting problems, of which these extra spaces are usually a symptom.

  Hyphenated Words

  You are likely to find a character known as a soft hyphen (­, ­, U+00AD) at various places throughout your book. Publishers and book layout tools commonly add this character inside long words at syllable breaks to allow the word to break into two parts at the end of a line. In print books, this makes full justification much nicer because the flow of the text is not interrupted by large amounts of space on a line left by a long word wrapping to the next line. The Kindle does not support the soft-hyphen character; it actually displays it in the text, regardless of whether or not the word is breaking across a line break. You will need to remove all of these characters from your book.

  However, be careful when removing them because sometimes the soft hyphens are actually in places where a regular hyphen should be, such as between compound words with three or more pieces.

  Special Combination Letters

  In some books, especially those that start out as PDF files from a publisher, you will find that some combinations of letters have been replaced with entities for combined letters called ligatures. The most common of
these ligatures are:

  ff — ff

  fi — fi

  fl — fl

  ffi — ffi

  ffl — ffl

  These are inserted by some publishers to ensure proper display and printing of the character combinations in the font chosen for the print book. Replacing them can be a small chore, especially since the conversion process may add a space after the entity when there should not be one. So, the word “find” may look like “fi nd”. The replacement process can be automated a little bit by doing a find and replace on the most unique words in the book, and by using this regex, switching out the entity as needed:

  Find: ([a-z])(ff)([a-z])

  Replace: 1ff2

  Other than that, you will just have to take some time to look at all of these instances and determine if the space after the entity is needed or not.

  Conclusion

  The formatting information in this chapter will be some of the most important information you have available as you convert your book. Be sure to refer to the sections above as often as necessary. In the next chapter we will look at some real-world examples of eBook formatting.

 

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