Help - docx hard to read

[Oversleep]

So I just got White Sand. It's .docx.

The thing is, I'd prefer an epub or pdf so I can read it with calibre. But when I try it just opens it in WordPad (I haven't got the Microsoft Office yet). (Also, when opened in calibre, title changes to 'Dragon Steel').

Anybody could help? I'm afraid to look at anything in that subforum, cause spoilers.

EDIT: Also, what's up with the underlined words?

Edited January 9, 2017 by Oversleep

[WeiryWriter he/him]

The name change is probably just because it's copyrighted by Dragonsteel Entertainment, Brandon's company, or something 'though I'm not sure why it would be doing that. There are converters on line that will give you an epub if you supply a .docx, that's what I did.

The underlined words are just manuscript notation for italics, underlining is easier to pick out when skimming a document.

[Oversleep]

A thousand thanks *bows*. Now, to change the font...

[Ironeyes he/him]

I opened my .docx in Adobe Reader on my phone, which is free and acts as if it were a pdf. Just another idea if you can't find a decent converter. 

[Stormfather-in-Law]

I had this problem too. If anyone else has this issue, there are many web-based doc -to- epub converters that work for free. I used one of these to convert White Sand, then it can be read in any e-reader.

[Snorkel]

Edited version of another post of mine...

Covers converting, removing underlines, putting in a table of contents and how to add a nice cover image.

Start off by downloading Calibre.

Once you've installed and loaded Calibre, go to the "Add Books" icon and import the .docx file.

Now select your book and click the big "Convert books" button. In the top right of the new screen is a drop down box where you can select a format to convert to.  Epub option is recommended. If you need .mobi format for kindle, you can use the "convert" option once you've finished editing your epub.  While you're on this screen, you'll notice the "Title" field near top right isn't the actual title.  Put in "White Sand".  If you want to import a cool picture to use as the cover, you can Browse and add that on this screen also. Pick OK and convert your book!

If you missed the cover/title options when converting and want to go back to that, you're looking for the "Edit metadata" button. This screen also gives you an option to generate a cover image.

I'll include some optional tweaking next, but you should have a converted book at this point that you can just go and read!  Your finished book will be by default in documents/Calibre Library/[author name]/[book name] on Windows.  But in the right-side pane of the main Calibre window you'll see "Path: Click to open", and clicking that link will take you straight to your ebook.

Select your book and press the big "Edit book" button for the next tweaks

Killing the underlined bits - personally I found the underlined sections very annoying to read! I changed it to italic.

Go to the Tools menu and pick "transform styles".

Click the "Add rule" button.  

Fill it in like this:

Then Add rule a second time for this:

Make sure the "Remove the property" is second on the rules list.

Press OK, it will come up with a box showing the changes.  Close that box.

Making your cover picture not stretched - If you imported a cover picture, go to Tools > Add cover, select the image, make sure "preserve aspect ratio" tick box is ticked and press OK.  Done!

Getting rid of the weird large text bits:

Go to the View menu and tick Table of Contents. This will appear at the Bottom Left.  Scroll down and click on the entries "Yes, but what is Lonzare?".

This will take you to the html file for that section. In the preview window on the right, you'll notice that the matching text is really large.  We're gonna fix that.  In the central pane, the relevant html file should have opened up (part0010.html), and this section is highlighted:

    <h1 class="block_10" id="toc_id_12">“Yes, but what is Lonzare?”</h1>
    <p class="block_3"><span class="calibre1">“Place you were going,” the girl said testily.  “Pay packmen.”</span></p>

Change the <h1> and </h1> to <p> and </p> (You're telling it that it's not a Header, it's a Paragraph).  Change the "Block_10" to the same number that's on the start of the next paragraph line, in this case "block_3".

    <p class="block_3" id="toc_id_12">“Yes, but what is Lonzare?”</p>
    <p class="block_3"><span class="calibre1">“Place you were going,” the girl said testily.  “Pay packmen.”</span></p>

Now scroll down the Table of Contents and do the same with the next four text entries.  There is an entry lower in the Table of Contents with a little arrow next to it, clicking on that will expand the Contents and reveal these entries.  Clicking on them should open up "part0019.html" and take you to "Reegent, you defeat your own arguments..."  Make the same changes for these four paragraphs in a row.  Don't forget to change the closing tags </h2> to </p>

If you edited the table of contents before doing this, you can find these sections using the Find function - Ctrl-F to bring you the box. At the bottom you can select "All text files" from what's being searched, and then just search for the text I mentioned to go straight to the relevant sections.

(The reason I chose to edit the html directly, rather than the style sheets, was that these sections are incorrectly identified as headers, not paragraph text.)

Optional - tidying up the Chapter One heading

The files part0001.html and part0002.html could be merged and then edited so they match the chapter headings for the other chapters.  Select one of these files in the File browser, then hold down ctrl and select the other. Right click and choose "Merge selected text files". It doesn't matter which of the names you choose for the resulting file.  Once you've merged it, you can edit the html directly to match part0003.html etc.

    <h1 class="block_1" id="toc_id_2">White Sand</h1>
    <div class="calibre2" id="calibre_pb_1"></div>
    <h2 class="block_5" id="toc_id_3">Chapter One</h2>

    becomes

    <h1 class="block_1" id="toc_id_2">White Sand</h1>
    <p class="block_2">Chapter One</p>

Filling in the table of contents 

Go to the Tools menu and pick "Table of Contents" > "Edit Table of Contents".

Then click on each one in order and type in a name. You can press tab to go to the next name.

The Table of Contents/Chapter headings are a bit annoying.  Select the ones with a little arrow next to them and choose "Flatten this entry".  You can make use of the Table of Contents preview pane (View > Table of Contents) to check where each entry is going to.  Use "Remove this entry" for the ones that don't go to useful places (They have paragraph text instead of "White Sand").

If you did the above step of merging two files, then delete "Chapter One" and rename the "White Sand" entries to Prologue, Chapter One - Thirty-Eight and Epilogue.

...

If you think everything is OK, save and quit.  If not, you can quit without saving and try again. Also, under the Edit menu you'll find some "revert" options to undo whatever you just did.  You can click on html files in the File browser pane and view them in the Preview pane to see how it's looking.

Edited December 23, 2022 by Snorkel
Removed the azw stuff, since kindle now support epub

[Omelio]

I see there is a much better solution above but my main problem since I was reading on my phone was having to find my place again. With Aether of Night I just suffered through.  In any case I just cut and pasted each chapter into its own document so I could at least limit the number of pages I had to navigate.