Formatting a Word manuscript for conversion

Word’s .docx is the format doc2epub reads best, and what Word saves by default. You can also upload .doc, .odt, .rtf, an Apple Pages document, or plain .txt/.md — those are converted to Word format first, and the Chapters step will say so.

A conversion is a round trip through another program’s idea of your document, so headings and spacing can shift. If your writing app can export .docx directly, that’s always the more faithful route: Google Docs is File → Download → Microsoft Word (.docx), Apple Pages is File → Export To → Word, and Scrivener is File → Compile with .docx as the output format.

• Uploads can be up to 25 MB. A manuscript over that is almost always over because of photos — Word’s File → Compress Pictures shrinks them in place. Don’t delete images to fit: they all stay in your book, and each one is sized for print automatically.
• Finish your editing pass first. Tracked changes are treated as accepted, and comments are left out of the book — accept or reject what’s pending, and move anything worth keeping out of the margins.
• Chapter detection expects English heading words (“Chapter One”, “Prologue”) — writing in another language, expect to mark your chapters by hand on the Chapters step.

The single most reliable thing you can do: put every chapter title in the same Word heading style — Heading 1 is the natural choice. If a chapter has its own subheadings — a point-of-view name like “Mara”, or a time-skip like “Five months later” — put those in a deeper heading level (Heading 2 or 3). They’ll become subheadings inside the chapter rather than chapters of their own.

No heading styles? These are detected too:

• Plain lines like Chapter 7, Chapter Seven, Ch. 7, Prologue or Epilogue — numbers can be digits, words (“Twenty-One”) or roman numerals.
• A page break (Ctrl+Enter, or Cmd+Enter on a Mac) before each chapter.
• Chapter lines set noticeably bigger than the body text (about 15% larger or more), or bold and centered.
• Chapter lines typed in ALL CAPS.

And a few things worth taking out before you upload:

• A typed table of contents — it’s detected and left out, and the Contents page switches itself on in its place: linked in the EPUB, with real page numbers in the PDF. (You can turn it on or off yourself under Settings → Pages.)
• Typed page numbers in the text — the book numbers its own pages.
• Text in Word’s headers and footers — those are never read, so anything living there is lost. Move it into the body.
• Shift+Enter line breaks where you meant new paragraphs — press Enter for a real paragraph break.
• Editorial notes like [TK] or (AU: check this) — they’ll be typeset as faithfully as everything else.

If detection came out wrong and re-styling the manuscript in Word feels like too much, the Chapters step has Suggest chapters with AI. The model only proposes where chapters begin and what they’re called — your text is never modified — and nothing changes until you’ve reviewed the proposed boundaries and applied them. Applying replaces your current chapter structure, so the review is the moment to catch a bad split.

Two things worth knowing. It’s a Pro feature, so sign in first. And your manuscript is never used to train AI models. On the rare manuscript too long to scan in full, the review panel says so — that’s your cue to double-check the proposed boundaries before applying.

A typo, a chapter break in the wrong place, a theme you’d like to try — none of it needs a fresh upload. Rebuilding is free, as many times as you like:

• View & edit on any chapter in the Chapters list opens its text right in the app — fix the typo and save.
• Chapters can be split at any paragraph, merged into the one above, renamed, or given a different role — prologue, epilogue, dedication, and the rest.
• In the editor, *word* marks italic and **word** marks bold — the same marks your manuscript’s formatting became on upload.
• Every choice on the Settings step — theme, fonts, trim size, ornaments — stays editable. Change anything, then Generate again.

For bigger rewrites, edit your Word document and upload the fresh version.

Some typesetting you never need to do by hand — it happens on every build:

• Straight quotes and apostrophes become proper curly ones — except inside code, where they stay straight on purpose.
• Two hyphens between words (like--this) become a real em dash, keeping your spacing exactly as typed.
• Print pages are justified and hyphenated automatically, with widow and orphan control; ebooks reflow to the reader’s screen. There’s no need to justify, hyphenate, or break lines yourself.
• A closing The End (or Fin) is centered with air above it, instead of being indented like an ordinary paragraph.
• Web and email links in your manuscript stay tappable links in the ebook.
• In themes with drop caps, the big letter lands on the first plain paragraph of prose. A chapter that opens with dialogue deliberately gets no drop cap — a three-line quotation mark reads as a mistake — and one that opens with a picture or a list passes the cap to the paragraph after it.

One surprise worth knowing in advance: the font choices on the Settings step shape the print PDF only. The ebook keeps reader-friendly defaults, because e-readers let every reader pick their own type.