[LG Castillo]

I love the easy of D2D but I can't seem to get my scene breaks to appear. I uploaded my Word document and everything looks great except the scene breaks.

I want this to indicate a scene break within a chapter: ***
But instead I get empty white space.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

 

[Aaron Pogue]

This was an early design decision at Draft2Digital to create a consistent look and feel. When the conversion software recognizes something that looks like a scene break, it replaces it with whitespace (a vertical gap) as is most common in print publishing.

That said, there has been strong demand to support scene break characters (such as *** or even a custom image/glyph), and the developers are working on a solution that will let individual users choose what to include in their scene breaks.

In the meantime, I don't know if other users have found workarounds, but if so I'd be happy to hear about them.

 

[LG Castillo]

OH! okay, I'll just change the way I indicate a scene change. 

 

[AnitaDobs]

OH! okay, I'll just change the way I indicate a scene change.

I use this centered: ...

The only issue is that the software picks it up as chapter in conversion so you end up with something like this:

Naughty Girls Love It

...

...

...

...

Contents

More by This Author

I've mentioned it over there a couple of times, and it was changed, but then just went back as being picked up as a chapter. My works are mostly short pieces, so it's not such a big problem for me.

 

[Mark E. Cooper]

I love the easy of D2D but I can't seem to get my scene breaks to appear. I uploaded my Word document and everything looks great except the scene breaks.

I want this to indicate a scene break within a chapter: ***
But instead I get empty white space.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Could you just upload the ePub you use for KDP? I use mine (which uses word page breaks) and it sailed through D2D fine. The books look the same in all the readers that way. Not sure how they look on apple as I don't own any.

 

[Maggie Dana]

Scene breaks with asterisks or other glyphs and separated from the text with space above and below are most definitely needed in ebooks (and in print books, too). If a scene break is indicated with vertical white space only, and the scene break falls at the top or bottom of a page, the reader won't know it's a scene break because it won't be obvious.

[Caveat: I've been designing and typesetting print books for 30+ years and ebooks for 2 years, and publishers (my clients) often tell me I know what I'm talking about.]

 

[LG Castillo]

This was an early design decision at Draft2Digital to create a consistent look and feel. When the conversion software recognizes something that looks like a scene break, it replaces it with whitespace (a vertical gap) as is most common in print publishing.

That said, there has been strong demand to support scene break characters (such as *** or even a custom image/glyph), and the developers are working on a solution that will let individual users choose what to include in their scene breaks.

In the meantime, I don't know if other users have found workarounds, but if so I'd be happy to hear about them.

I have another problem. Is there a way to prevent the conversion process from making an indent?

If I D2D uses a vertical gap for a scene break, then I would like the following paragraph after the gap to NOT be indented. When I tried this out,
D2D indents the paragraph no matter what. Is there a way around this?

 

[LG Castillo]

Could you just upload the ePub you use for KDP? I use mine (which uses word page breaks) and it sailed through D2D fine. The books look the same in all the readers that way. Not sure how they look on apple as I don't own any.

The epub was created by D2D and doesn't have the ***. That's the problem. Actually, the mobi file that was created by D2D converted the *** to five dashes, so at least there was some type of scene break.

 

[LG Castillo]

+1000

Under no circumstances should you ever replace a scene break with a blank line.

I prefer to have a scene break. Any recommendations for software I can use to convert a Word doc to epub? I've already tried Scrivener (too cumbersome and didn't work well for me) and prefer not to use Smashwords.

 

[Julie Harris]

Maybe we should all email Microsoft and tell them to include 'save as epub' in their next version of Word.

 

[Gertie Kindle]

Scene breaks with asterisks or other glyphs and separated from the text with space above and below are most definitely needed in ebooks (and in print books, too). If a scene break is indicated with vertical white space only, and the scene break falls at the top or bottom of a page, the reader won't know it's a scene break because it won't be obvious.

[Caveat: I've been designing and typesetting print books for 30+ years and ebooks for 2 years, and publishers (my clients) often tell me I know what I'm talking about.]

Absolutely. The three vertical spaces could be an error and look unprofessional. I don't mind the way it comes out in Mobi with the dashes, but there should be something. My short works don't have chapters and scene breaks are essential.

 

[LG Castillo]

Maybe we should all email Microsoft and tell them to include 'save as epub' in their next version of Word.

Yep! I'm all for that!

 

[AnitaDobs]

I prefer to have a scene break. Any recommendations for software I can use to convert a Word doc to epub? I've already tried Scrivener (too cumbersome and didn't work well for me) and prefer not to use Smashwords.

calibre

 

[LG Castillo]

calibre

Thank you! I tried calibre and it worked perfectly.

 

[Speaker-To-Animals]

I prefer to have a scene break. Any recommendations for software I can use to convert a Word doc to epub? I've already tried Scrivener (too cumbersome and didn't work well for me) and prefer not to use Smashwords.

Very specific Word & calibre instructions, including how to get a TOC (both HTML and NCX). Site is NSFW, this particular link is.

 

[Katherine Roberts]

Linda, I noticed the same thing with Draft2Digital. (In my Word doc, I use a single * to indicate a scene break, which was converted to several blank lines. Also, my left-justified first line of each section/chapter was given an indent.)

I'm pleased to report the epub is now published to Nook(less than 12 hours), Kobo(5 days) and Apple(6 days) with no trouble, and it was all very easy so I've certainly no complaints! But since this is beta, and Aaron says it might be possible to add some formatting options in the future, I'm another one who would like something more obvious than a space to mark a scene break, and ideally I'd like to keep my left-justified first line of sections and chapters.

Also, is there any way of keeping a space above and below pictures, and between occasional lines of text? I use "space after 10pt" in Word's paragraph formatting to do this for the Kindle when I upload to Amazon, but Draft2Digital stripped these spaces out during conversion. I suppose I could use a * (see above!) but the space would then be too large, I think...

Any ideas?

 

[Gertie Kindle]

Linda, I noticed the same thing with Draft2Digital. (In my Word doc, I use a single * to indicate a scene break, which was converted to several blank lines. Also, my left-justified first line of each section/chapter was given an indent.)

I'm pleased to report the epub is now published to Nook(less than 12 hours), Kobo(5 days) and Apple(6 days) with no trouble, and it was all very easy so I've certainly no complaints! But since this is beta, and Aaron says it might be possible to add some formatting options in the future, I'm another one who would like something more obvious than a space to mark a scene break, and ideally I'd like to keep my left-justified first line of sections and chapters.

Also, is there any way of keeping a space above and below pictures, and between occasional lines of text? I use "space after 10pt" in Word's paragraph formatting to do this for the Kindle when I upload to Amazon, but Draft2Digital stripped these spaces out during conversion. I suppose I could use a * (see above!) but the space would then be too large, I think...

Any ideas?

When I want one space, I put two. D2D automatically strips out one space.

 

[Katherine Roberts]

When I want one space, I put two. D2D automatically strips out one space.

Ah, thank you - that sounds easy! I'll try it next time.

Just uploaded three more books today, and have got around the scene break/white space issue - I used a tiny image (height about 25 pixels), centred, and that seems to be left alone by D2D and looks OK at all the different text sizes in the epub... not quite so good at the very smallest and very largest, but still obvious it's a scene break.

So now I'm happy.

 

[Gertie Kindle]

Ah, thank you - that sounds easy! I'll try it next time.

Just uploaded three more books today, and have got around the scene break/white space issue - I used a tiny image (height about 25 pixels), centred, and that seems to be left alone by D2D and looks OK at all the different text sizes in the epub... not quite so good at the very smallest and very largest, but still obvious it's a scene break.

So now I'm happy.

Thank you. I shall try it on the next one. Big relief that something works.

 

[Lynn Mixon]

Aaron, now that D2D is in open beta (congrats!), is there any word on when this issue will be resolved? I know I can insert an image, but I'd rather use asterisks. Yes, I could make my own epub, but then I can't take advantage of the system D2D is putting together to create the ebook, especially some of the exciting things that are being talked about for the future, like creating a vendor specific titles list with links.

Seriously, this is the one major negative to D2D and I can't understand what is taking so long to see it addressed. It seems like a simple thing to fix. Can you give us an update? Poke the developers? Something?

Thanks.