Using Amazon's KDP Paperback Publishing System - Some Tips

[MineralMan]

7. In this case, the problems were caused by having to

have the original paper manuscript from 20 years ago scanned and OCRed to create the text document. That process inserted some tab characters that interfered with proper text flow.

Normal Word documents, created by typing the content into Word wouldn't have had such problems. Since the KDP publishing environment for paperback print-on-demand books is based on ready-to-print pdf files, it's more complicated than their e-book system, which is actually HTML based.

Either way, though, the system accepts Word documents as input and converts them into the proper format. The paperback process is more picky about formatting, and the OCR application inserted some stuff that would never be in a typed document. Fortunately, I'm a Word wizard, so I could find and correct those problems without much effort, once the publication system located formatting problems. The e-book process imported the same file without any difficult or errors at all. The problem was in the conversion from Word to PDF.