When you start KC and create a new project, you’ll start with importing the source file. The formatting is limited to 9 groups (of which some, like chapter headers or separator, have very clear purpose) – while hand-coding would allow you to do anything you wish, provided you have the necessary skills and knowledge. Which means you have to put your faith in the previewer and can’t test the result on your Kindle device/app which can’t read the *.kpf file. The file KC spits out is *.kpf – a file that’s readable only by Amazon’s book upload interface. You can pretty much choose between sacrificing one for another, while hand-coding would give you some ways to bypass this. One thing that is troublesome to adjust is Table of Contents if you use number + title. KC has four basic templates, which allow only limited customization. Some changes aren’t intuitive (at least not at first).Export file can’t be loaded by a Kindle device/app.KC also has a handy tool for drop cap – used for the first paragraph in chapter, if you choose to. This is one of the aspects hard to hand-code. This allows the reader to open the book after the front matter and pops up the ‘rate and review’ screen at 100% – this is why not to put the prologue into the front matter – the reader would auto-skip it. KC also shows you what it considers front and end matter (and if you use its tools, it’ll put prologue into front matter and epilogue into end matter – do not do this!!!) – which sets what is considered point 0% and point 100%. I think the fact KC uses smart hyphenation from the moment you import the source file is a good point as you can use it to scroll through and see if there are any words with weird results – though I’m not sure if there any ways to remedy them.
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