Michael R. Hicks

While Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP), which is Amazon’s interface for self-publishers and small presses to get their books into the Kindle Store, has been gradually improving, one thing that remains a major pain in the you-know-where is uploading documents created on a Mac.

As with many systems, Amazon’s DTP is designed for input from Microsoft Windows applications, and doesn’t like the way Mac apps typically encode text characters: DTP won’t accept documents encoded with Unicode, although it does now seem to take (or at least produce) documents with UTF-8. Without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, those encodings map out character sets beyond the Windows-standard Latin-1 (Western) encoding and English/western European character sets (Unicode provides support for a wide range of international characters).

Where Mac users run into problems is that 1) DTP won’t accept the more typical Mac documents natively produced by Pages or TextEdit, and 2) if you’re preparing the print version of your document in Pages, you can’t output directly to HTML (which is a really silly oversight, methinks).

There are other programs, particularly InDesign, that many Mac users use to format their print versions; I can’t help you with those, because I only have Pages and TextEdit, but hopefully what I go over here will help.

So, let’s say that you have your book set up in Pages and it’s ready to go. Here’s what I did that seemed to work:

Step 1: Save it as an RTF file.

Step 2: Open the RTF file in TextEdit.

Step 3: In TextEdit do Save As -> HTML

You can then edit the HTML file as (or if) necessary in an editor like Taco. Once that’s done, take the HTML file and any image files it needs, zip them together – you must use a program that has a “Windows-friendly” zip option (like YemuZip) or DTP won’t accept it! – and then upload it to DTP.

I wish I could say that I could guarantee you that this will work for your document, but with the vagaries of DTP, I can’t. I know this worked for my novel In Her Name: Empire, and as long as you use an English or western European character set you should – I hope – be fine.

However, if you’re using another character set – let’s just take Chinese as one of many examples – it will not work. The Kindle is still very limited in what it can do compared to web applications. It looks like DTP has moved up from accepting only Latin-1 (Western) encoded documents to at least accepting UTF-8 encodings, but you may still run into trouble: if you try to upload your HTML and DTP comes back with a long unintelligible error that has “unicode” buried in it, chances are this is the problem.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any immediate solutions to that: my first recommendation would be for you to go back and make sure your HTML is Latin-1 (Windows) or UTF-8, not Unicode (these are all separate options for encoding, depending on your app).

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Digital Text Platform, DTP, Unicode, UTF-8

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 6:35 am and is filed under About Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.