How to handle formatted text examples in book content?

Question

I am preparing a book for print that includes many (60+) examples of formatted text (indentation is used for a specific purpose in the method that the book describes and a different font helps set the examples apart from the body of the book.)

Originally, I planned to make all of the examples into image files to solve this problem, but found that did not work well for the print version. So gave up and decided on two separate source files, one for print and one for Kindle.

Now I'm wondering if there is any better way of handling formatted text (indentation, different font) in the Kindle world, before I generate a sizable number of image files.

Can anyone point me in a direction of some information that might be useful?

Thanks for your help...

Answer 1

The Kindle formatting Guide (downloadable PDF) is a good source of information. Google it.

Using Images to display text is a NO! NO! (Explaining why would take several paragraphs).

It sounds as though you don't have a lot of experience with using CSS with HTML. That might be a problem. This isn't something you could do easily with a MS Word to epub conversion.

I would recommend Paul Salvette's ebook The eBook Design and Development Guide about doing these kinds of things. A little out of date, but still good information. (Liz Castro's book is also great, but it was written early on and she had to create lots of kludgy workarounds to make things work. You no longer need those things).

Here's his tutorial about formatting/indenting/paragraphing
http://www.paulsalvette.com/2012/04/indents-margins-and-alignment-for.html

You probably want to look at some boilerplate css for ebooks.

Here's Salvette's http://bbebooksthailand.com/bb-CSS-boilerplate.html