Pre­pare Your Doc­u­ment for Im­port­ing into Inkwell

Your man­u­script is ready to be im­port­ed into Inkwell for for­mat­ting. Con­grat­u­la­tions! We can help to get you ready to pub­lish your work. As au­thors our­selves, we know how ex­cit­ing that can be.

Be­fore im­port­ing a doc­u­ment from Mi­crosoft Word into Inkwell, there are sev­er­al steps that you can take to en­sure that the process will be as smooth as pos­si­ble. Let’s take a look.

Save a New Ver­sion of Your Doc­u­ment in Word

It may make sense for you to save a new ver­sion of your doc­u­ment in Word be­fore pro­ceed­ing with the im­port into Inkwell, es­pe­cial­ly if you have spe­cial for­mat­ting fea­tures, cus­tom styles, com­pli­cat­ed math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las, or very large im­ages.

To save a new ver­sion, click on File, Save As, re­name your doc­u­ment, set the file for­mat to Word Doc­u­ment (*.docx) if it’s not al­ready, then click the Save but­ton. Your orig­i­nal file will re­main un­changed, and you will be work­ing with a new ver­sion that you will use dur­ing the im­port process.

Now, let’s move for­ward with get­ting your doc­u­ment ready for im­port­ing.

Word’s For­mat­ting Fea­tures

There are a few fea­tures in Word that we will en­able in prepa­ra­tion for your im­port.

First, let’s turn on the Nav­i­ga­tion Pan­el. To do that, click view in the top menu, then make sure the op­tion for Nav­i­ga­tion Pane is checked. This will dis­play a nav­i­ga­tion menu on the left side of the screen that shows all chap­ter and sec­tion ti­tles with­in your doc­u­ment. This al­lows you to eas­i­ly jump around with­in your doc­u­ment.

The sec­ond fea­ture that’s re­al­ly help­ful is the Show Para­graphs Mark but­ton. To tog­gle this fea­ture on, go to the Home menu, then click the Para­graphs icon, lo­cat­ed in the Para­graphs sec­tion of the top menu.

Table of Con­tents

Inkwell will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly build a ta­ble of con­tents for your project that is op­ti­mized for pub­lish­ing in both print copy and ePub ver­sions, so there is no need to im­port a ta­ble of con­tents. If you have al­ready built a ta­ble of con­tents, you can go ahead and delete it from the Word doc­u­ment.

Oth­er Front Mat­ter

Inkwell will also au­to­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate a ti­tle page and copy­right page, so there is no need to im­port them into Inkwell.

Chap­ter Breaks

To en­sure that chap­ters im­port cor­rect­ly into Inkwell, it is im­por­tant to make sure that chap­ter ti­tles and sec­tion head­ers are styled cor­rect­ly in Word.

The pre­ferred way to sig­nal to Inkwell that you’re be­gin­ning a new chap­ter is to style the chap­ter ti­tle as Head­ing 1 in the styles menu in Word. Like­wise, sec­tion head­ers should be styled as Head­ing 2, sub­sec­tions should be styled as Head­ing 3, etc.