bulleted list?

[powerofted]

Is it possible to make a bulleted list that will pass through Meatgrinder? What is the best method?
Thank you.

[Ted]

Don't use the MSWord bullet list, it could mess things up. Make one manually like this:
* Blah
* Blah blah
* Blah blah blah

[murray]

Yeah I've just tried converting my first Smashwords book and found that bullet lists and numbered lists don't format very well in the meatgrinder generated Mobi file but look fine in ePub and PDF. In Mobi they appear with the text on the next line to the bullet or number.

You can manually do it, as Ted suggested, but you won't get proper indenting for when the text wraps to the next line.

[Julie Harris]

This page might help with many issues regarding Word, not just bulleting.
www.shaunakelly.com/word/bullets/controlbullets.html
I made my list bullet style with a custom indent, looks fine on epub, perfect in Word, not so great on mobi (via Calibre).

[dolmen]

Apr 12, 2012 14:57:08 GMT -8 Ted said:

Don't use the MSWord bullet list, it could mess things up. Make one manually like this:
* Blah
* Blah blah
* Blah blah blah

Do you know how to generate a numbered list that gets through the meatgrinder?

[jpeaceokec]

Is a character like an asterisk all that is available for bullets? No special ASCII characters?

[aristotle]

I just used a hyphen. Example:
- This line
- Then this line
- Then this line.
Worked fine at Smashwords and Amazon.

[Julie Harris]

The bullet is Symbol character code 183 from the insert menu. Using the degree symbol doesn't work in all epublications, so am not sure this bullet character will either. Not sure about the ASCII characters - I can't find my list anywhere!

[jpeaceokec]

Thanks for the tips. I have a lot of bullets in my book, and alas they aren't one or two word bullets. It's non-fiction, educational, and I used bullets to make various points stand out so they would be easy to grasp. That really requires an indent. It looks like the mobi version just isn't going to allow that, or rather, it won't look quite as good, but that setting up a special style for an indented bullet would work OK for the pdf and epub styles. What about rtf?

[Ted]

The most popular formats for retailers are epub and sometimes PDF. Mobi mainly available from Amazon, although mobi also available on Smashwords, so I'd suggest doing what most Smashwords authors do; read the KDP style guide and format a version just for Amazon.

I'm not sure how many ereaders or tablets use RTF anymore. It sounds like your work would be aimed at students. 46% of students with tablets have an iPad according to a recent study on tablets and teaching. The iPad reads ePub natively, but there are apps for reading other formats on iPads.

[jpeaceokec]

I was already thinking about doing a special format separate from Smashwords for the Amazon Kindle. Thanks for the tips. College students and young urban residents are my primary targets.

What about graphic lines? I searched through the Style Manual and didn't find anything one way or another. For example, I have sections and chapters, and one of my thoughts for distinguishing a section is to put its number and name and then underneath, a line across the page.

[Julie Harris]

You could always try creating the graphic line you want as an image - gif or jpeg, just make sure it's not wider than 400 pixels - 300 is safest. Some free clip art sites have graphic lines, so investigate... Resize width of the image using a graphics program BEFORE you insert into Word - never resize using Word picture format tools.
Bulleted list will work as rtf file. All you need do to see the rtf file is save your Word document as .rtf and open it in Word.
www.shaunakelly.com/word/bullets/controlbullets.html
This tutorial shows you how to create a style-based bullet list - not simply using the list on the main menu bar. Once you create the bullet list style you can modify it to get the indent level you require. I used this for multiple indented bullet lists in a mobi once and it was passable, worked really well on the epub version. But I use Atlantis Word Processor to create epubs. How I love Atlantis - it's what Word used to be - simple and effective and fairly cheap ($30). Doesn't yet do tables though.
Best of luck with this project.
Julie.

[jpeaceokec]

The suggestion to use an image for the graphic line is great and very helpful. Getting an attractive format involves a certain amount of out-of-the-box finagling I'm thinking.

Thanks again to everybody for your help, for someone just wandering in the door and getting started. I have a long book, lol, so there is plenty of work ahead of me once I decide how this will look. I've been downloading and browsing free books from the Smashwords pages and elsewhere just to get a feel for what others are doing. Some people definitely do a better job than others in formatting their books.

[Ted]

jpeaceokec, I'm a firm believer in stealing ideas. Every new author should look at lots of ebooks for ideas. Good for you.

[idiotprogrammer]

this is pretty sad. In HTML it is a trivial task to make a list, and yet even the SW style guide doesn't provide instructions about how to get it done. It doesn't seem to work; instead it reverts to a different font size on my Nook (very bizzare), and the bullets don't get placed well.

If you do it manually (as one or two of you have suggested), the problem is that the second line of each list item isn't indented properly

There should be a way to create lists in Smashwords.....