Inserting HTML Line Breaks

Something has always bugged me about my uploads to Amazon.  When I have Davina’s Magical Radio as a Word doc, it looks amazing, format-wise at least — would I lie to you?

But, I then convert it to html for Amazon, and they convert it to the Kindle format.  And — drumroll please — it doesn’t look so hot after that.  It’s kind of squished.  All the spaces are missing, like between the chapter title and the first line of that chapter.  No biggie in some ways, but looks like I don’t know what I’m doing — amateurish — which may be true, but I don’t want everyone to know.

And along comes the magic line-break.  Years ago, believe it or not, I knew HTML — way before it was even cool to know it.  I actually designed one of the first web pages for a city I contracted with — it wasn’t beautiful, but it was still one of the first.

However, html has flown from my brain, as have so many other fine tid-bits of info.  But I knew, deep, deep down, I knew there was a way to fix my line-break problem.

And last night I found it.  Now it is probably not the fastest way — those of you who really know html can go ahead and laugh, I really don’t mind — but it is A way.

I use/insert <br/> at the end of a line when I want a break before the next one.  I convert the Word doc to html, and then use Notepad to modify the html code.  It takes a long time to insert all the line breaks I want, but it makes my happy when I see the final result:  No more Squishy!

So, the next time you’re reading Davina’s Magical Radio on a Kindle, and you come to a pretty line break, you can say, “Not only did he write the book, he made it pretty for me too.”