Word Cleaner 7.x is the best desktop option for sending an old book from a Word file to genuinely clean Amazon ebook-ready HTML, via its standard template “Convert to HTML and remove formatting”. It retains linked and anchored footnotes, bold, italics etc. Two simple tweaks on this cleaning template can also convert all accents and symbols like © to HTML code entities, and also do the same for the quote marks, —’s and apostrophes. For a minute of work, you’re 90% of the way to an ebook that will validate when uploaded to the Amazon ebook system.
But there’s a big drawback. It can’t retain the indented paragraphs, of the type you used to add your scholarly quotes in Microsoft Word. What you want, then, before you export is to add some nice HTML blockquote tags on your quotes…
These tags will survive passing through the Word Cleaner template, and will display the text as an indented quote in your cleanly-coded HTML ebook.
Are you going to go through and add those tags to 300+ quotes, by hand? No, you’re going to have Word to do it for you. Without fiddling around with macros.
WORKFLOW:
Scenario: you used the Indent paragraph button to add the quotes in your scholarly book, and thus have all quotes indented by 0.5.
1. Alt + H to open the Search/Replace box. Click on “More” button in bottom-left of the box.
2. Place cursor into “Find what” box. Click “More” to open up the lower half of this box. Then click the “Format” button in the bottom-left.
3. Dial the Indentation up to 0.5 (or whatever you have it set to)…
4. Exit the Format | Find Paragraph panels and then place your mouse cursor into the “Replace With” box. Type in your blockquote tag. Run the search and replace.
5. Return both Search/Replace boxes to their default, by clicking “No formatting” on each.
6. Now you do this wildcard search-and-append, adding the required ending tag to any paragraphs that contain the word “blockquote”.
To work, this needs you to have ticked “Use wildcards”…
Once there’s a recurring unique word in the quote paragraphs, then Word can hook onto that to add the closing tag to the end of each such paragraph. The tag is added after any footnote-number at the end of the quote, if there is one.
Completing this process will have also tagged… i) indented paragraphs quotes that do not begin with ” and… ii) multiple-paragraph indented quotations and most indented lists, poetry etc. That would not have been the case had we just tagged all paragraphs starting with a “.
You should end up with this…
Note that if you have such indents in the footnotes as well, then you’ll also need to run these two there as well. You may still have some numbered lists or poems that will require search for a ^t tab or a different indentation of other than 0.5.
Finally, remove your drop caps at the start of each chapter, and then save the Word .doc, and load it to Word Cleaner 7.x. This really is the best and easiest desktop option, based on my day of intensive searching and testing in 2019. But if you really need desktop freeware then HTML Cleaner 1.02 is a Windows GUI freeware that is genuinely free, and though difficult to use is quite powerful and has a Help file. You may also want to test a half-dozen free online services, though you may find they choke on a huge 400-page book with indented quotes and footnotes, and that they may be aimed at accurate replication-in-HTML rather than tag stripping and cleaning for Kindle ebooks.