Nonfiction and technical books
Real footnotes, real tables, and fenced code listings — how each one travels from Word into a book that holds up in print and on an e-reader.
Nonfiction & academic
Use real Word footnotes and endnotes (References → Insert Footnote) — they become numbered notes at the end of each chapter, with tappable links in the ebook. Use real tables (Insert → Table), never columns lined up with tabs: tabs don’t survive reflow on an e-reader. And headings like Appendix A, Glossary or Bibliography keep their own names — they’ll never be renamed “Chapter 14”.
The harbor closed to commercial traffic in 1911.1 Insert Footnote
1 Town records, vol. XII, p. 84.
The harbor closed to commercial traffic in 1911.1
Notes
1. Town records, vol. XII, p. 84.
Technical books & code
Type a line of three backticks — ``` — before your listing and another after it. That works the same in Word, Google Docs, and the section editor on the Chapters step, with no styles to set up. Everything between the fences is set in monospace with its indentation and straight quotes preserved exactly; the smart-quote conversion that polishes your prose deliberately skips it, so "quotes" in a listing never turn curly. If your manuscript already uses a Word paragraph style named Code, Source Code, Plain Text, Preformatted Text or HTML Preformatted, those are detected too.
The whole fix was three lines:
```
def retry(task):
for n in range(3):
task(delay=2 ** n)
```
The whole fix was three lines:
def retry(task):
for n in range(3):
task(delay=2 ** n)