Import from Microsoft Word

What comes across

Alhora reads the Word XML directly rather than going through an intermediate format, so more survives than most authors expect:

Chapter structure

From Word heading styles. Heading 1 becomes a chapter; a folder-like Part structure is recognised from part headings.

Character formatting

Italic, bold, small caps, superscript and subscript, and strikethrough.

Footnotes and endnotes

Both, as real notes attached to their reference point — not flattened into the text.

Hyperlinks

Including the ones Word stores as complex fields rather than simple links.

Lists

Ordered and unordered, with nesting.

Tables

As tables, with their cell structure.

Images

Extracted from the archive and placed at their reference points.

Block quotes and scene breaks

Recognised from styles, and from the common conventions where styles are absent.

Ten minutes of preparation that decide the result

No importer can recover a structure the document never had. Before you export:

1. Apply real heading styles to chapter titles. Heading 1 in Word — an actual style, not bold 18pt text. This is the single thing that determines whether your chapters arrive as chapters.
2. Remove manual page breaks between chapters. The formatter inserts its own, and yours will fight it.
3. Accept all tracked changes and turn track changes off. Tracked changes can import as visible text.
4. Delete runs of empty paragraphs used as spacing, and every double space after a full stop.
5. Replace tab-indented first lines with a paragraph style that indents. Tabs survive and then sit on top of the styling.
6. Use one scene-break convention throughout — whichever you like, but only one.
7. Save as .docx, not .doc. The old binary format is not read by modern importers.

What does not come across, and why

• Comments and tracked changes. Deliberately: they are editorial apparatus, not book content, and importing them would put them in your published book.
• Headers and footers. A print book generates its own running heads and folios; carrying Word's across would produce two sets.
• Manual page breaks. The typesetting engine paginates, so imported breaks would fight it.
• Text boxes and floating shapes. Word positions these absolutely on a page that will not exist after repagination.
• Fonts and point sizes. Deliberately: you pick an interior style in Alhora, and importing Word's Calibri 11pt would just be something to undo.
• Section breaks and multi-column layout.

The general rule: structure and meaning come across, presentation does not. That is the correct division — you are importing a manuscript, not a design.

After the import: what to do next

1. Check the chapter list against your manuscript. This is the only step that matters — everything else is recoverable, and a missing chapter found at export is not.
2. Set the trim size before anything else. It determines page count, which determines the gutter margin and the spine.
3. Choose an interior style. This is where the book stops looking like a document.
4. Fill in the metadata — title, author, ISBN, series — because the title page, copyright page and also-by page are generated from it.
5. Run the print-readiness checks, then export EPUB and a print-ready PDF.