Preferred Formatting for the Microsoft Reader

When preparing an OEB-compliant document, apply XHTML rules for producing well-formed markup (see the OEB specification, http://www.openebook.org/). Follow these rules to ensure smooth conversion using all electronic book-publishing tools.

Note, however, that you can sometimes ignore these rules, depending on the strength of your conversion tools. This is because the conversion process involves two steps:

  1. Validating and cleaning up documents in "wild" HTML and other formats to meet the Reader criteria.

  2. Writing a new file in the Reader format.

Some tools have a stronger system for the cleanup step than others, and so not all of the following rules may apply. Consult your tools vendor documentation for exact details. The rules are:

These requirements result in well-formed XML or HTML that is easily converted to .lit, the Microsoft Reader file format. For more information on writing well-formed XML, please see the XHTML specification at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/.

When non-OEB-compliant documents of MIME type text/html are used as source documents for conversion to .lit files, you can use upper case and lower case forms of predefined tags interchangeably.

For more information, see:

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