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Your manuscript, typeset like a real book.

Drop in a Word file. Get back a valid EPUB and a paperback interior ready to upload to Amazon KDP, with the margins, the drop capitals and the line breaking that make a page look set rather than converted. It all happens in this browser.

Format a bookSee the eight designs

i

The Watery Part of the World
reach of the Thames stretched before us like the
beginning of an interminable waterway. In the
offing the sea and the sky were welded together
without a joint, and in the luminous space the
tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the
tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of
canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished
sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran
out to sea in vanishing flatness.
 
The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther
back still seemed condensed into a mournful
gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and
the greatest, town on earth.
 
The Director of Companies was our captain and
our host. We four affectionately watched his
back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward.
On the whole river there was nothing that looked
half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to
a seaman is trustworthiness personified.
 
Between us there was, as I have already said
somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding
our hearts together through long periods of
separation, it had the effect of making us
tolerant of each other's yarns, and even of each
other's convictions.
 
The Accountant had brought out already a box of
dominoes, and was toying architecturally with
the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft,
leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken
cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an
ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped,
resembled an idol.
 
The day was ending in a serenity of still and
exquisite brilliance. The water shone
230
XVII
The Lighthouse
C
ALL ME ISHMAEL. Some years
ago … having little or no
money in my purse, and
nothing particular to interest me on shore, I
thought I would sail about a little and see the
watery part of the world. It is a way I have of
driving off the spleen and regulating the
circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim
about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly
November in my soul; whenever I find myself
involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet
… then, I account it high time to get to sea as
soon as I can.
 
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With
a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself
upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
There is nothing surprising in this. If they but
knew it, almost all men in their degree, some
time or other, cherish very nearly the same
feelings towards the ocean with me.
 
Right and left, the streets take you waterward.
Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that
noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
231
A spread at 6″ × 9″ in the Garamond design: mirrored margins, a sunk chapter opening with a three-line drop capital, a running head in small capitals, and the folio centred at the foot.
  • Word, Markdown or plain text in
  • A valid EPUB 3 and a print-ready paperback interior out
  • Eight book designs, real typefaces, drop capitals and scene breaks
  • Nothing uploaded, no account, no watermark

Why it reads as a book

Lines here are broken with the Knuth–Plass algorithm, the one TeX uses, over the whole paragraph at once rather than greedily, one line at a time, with hyphenation. That single difference is what removes the rivers of white space running down a justified page, and rivers are what make a self-published book recognisable from across a room before anyone has read a word of it.

The rest is the printer’s specification. 16 trim sizes, mirrored margins, and an inside margin derived from the final page count. Amazon widens that requirement in five bands, from 0.375″ upwards, because a thicker book opens less flat and swallows more of the gutter. The engine typesets the book, reads the real page count, and lays it out again.

None of it leaves your machine. An unpublished manuscript is the most private document most people own, and this site has no backend to send one to: turn off your network once the page has loaded and every feature still works.

ii

Contents

Three steps, about five minutes

Open the file

01

A .docx, a Markdown file or plain text. Chapters are found from your heading styles, your page breaks, or the lines that announce them, and the chapter list tells you which, so you can see whether to trust it.

Pick a design

02

Eight of them, each a complete set of typographic decisions rather than a colour scheme. Adjust the size, the leading and the trim, and watch the page count move.

Export both

03

A valid EPUB 3 with accessibility metadata, and a print PDF with embedded subset fonts. Both free, both unwatermarked, both generated on your machine.

The details nobody else bothers with

None of these is visible on its own. Together they are the whole difference between a book and a converted document.

The first paragraph is not indented
Not after a chapter opening, a scene break, a block quote or an image either. An indent means “this continues”; after a break there is nothing to continue, and the indent reads as a mistake. No generic converter sets this, because it cannot be read out of the Word file.
Widows and orphans are prevented
A paragraph's opening line never sits alone at the foot of a page, and its closing line never arrives alone at the top of the next. Both are absolute rules in trade publishing and neither is enforced by a word processor.
Chapters open on a right-hand page
Which means blank left-hand pages where they fall, carrying no page number and no running head. That is what a printed book does.
The inside margin follows the page count
Amazon widens its requirement in five bands as the book thickens. The engine typesets the book, reads the real page count, and lays it out again, starting from the widest gutter, so every intermediate state over-estimates rather than under.
Word's run-splitting is undone
Word splits a run at every spell-check boundary; one italicised word commonly arrives as six. Converters emit six elements and you get hairline gaps inside italic words. Here they are merged before anything is rendered.
Straight quotes become real quotes
Contextually, so that ’tis and the ’90s get an apostrophe rather than an opening quote, and across formatting boundaries, so the apostrophe in don’t comes out right.
Drop capitals are measured, not guessed
The initial's cap height spans exactly three lines and its baseline sits on the third, computed from the font's own metrics. That is why it looks right in all eight designs rather than in some of them.
The EPUB declares its accessibility honestly
Access modes, features and a written summary, all derived from the book rather than asserted. A book with undescribed images gets metadata saying so, which is both correct under the European Accessibility Act and the thing that prompts you to go and fix it.

Eight designs, no skins

Compare all eight →
TradeThe safe default. What a paperback looks like when nobody is showing off.GaramondA sixteenth-century face, a drop cap, and a lot of air. Literary fiction.BaskervilleHigh contrast, high x-height, easy at small sizes. Built for 5 × 8.MemoirWarm, contemporary, slightly informal. Reads like a voice.LyricLight on the page, wide leading, room to breathe. Poetry and short forms.HumanistCalligraphic, slightly irregular, designed for very long reading.ManualSans headings, serif text, numbered chapters. Non-fiction with structure.GridSans throughout, tight and functional. Workbooks and reference.

Questions

Is it really free?
Yes. Every design, both exports, no watermark, no account, no card. There is no paid tier today. If one ever appears it will be optional extras. The EPUB and the print PDF will not be the thing you pay for, because a formatter that holds the file hostage after you have done the work is the thing this was built to avoid.
Does my manuscript get uploaded?
No. The site is a static page with no backend of any kind: there is no server to send a file to. The Word document is read in the tab, the typesetting runs in the tab, and both exports are written in the tab. You can disconnect from the network after the page loads and everything still works.
Does it work on Windows?
Yes, and on Linux, and on a Chromebook, and on a Mac. It runs in the browser, so the operating system is not involved. This is worth saying because the best-regarded tool in this category is macOS-only, and a lot of authors have bought a second-hand Mac Mini to use it.
Will the PDF be accepted by Amazon KDP?
It is built to their published paperback specification: one of their trim sizes, mirrored margins with the inside margin set from the final page count, their minimums on the other three sides, and real embedded fonts. The Check panel reports anything that would be rejected before you upload. Amazon can change its requirements, so the specification date is shown on the trim-size page.
How long a book can it handle?
A full-length novel without complaint. The parsing and typesetting run on a background thread, so the interface keeps answering while a 150,000-word manuscript is laid out. This is a deliberate answer to the most common complaint about browser-based formatters, which is that they stall on anything longer than a sample.
Can I edit the text here?
Only the chapter titles and the metadata. The writing stays in your writing app: re-import after you change it and your design settings are kept. A formatter that is also a text editor becomes a worse version of both, and it means the real manuscript lives in a browser tab, which is not where a book should live.
What about footnotes?
In the EPUB they become popup footnotes, which is the modern form and keeps the reader's place. In the printed PDF they become endnotes at the back, in order of first reference. True foot-of-the-page footnotes are not supported: placing a note shortens the page, which can move the reference to the next page, which moves the note, and solving that loop is not implemented.
Is my work saved?
It is kept in this browser so you can close the tab and come back. That is a convenience and not a backup: clearing site data wipes it, a private window never had it, and a browser may evict it under storage pressure. Use “Save project” for a real backup file you keep.

Open your manuscript

It takes about ten seconds to see what your book looks like set. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is asked of you.

Format a book