How are pictures in my manuscript handled?
Pictures that are already in your Word file come through into both exports — the print PDF and the EPUB. You don't place them again here; the formatter reads them out of the manuscript and sets them where they belong.
The three kinds
The formatter sorts every picture into one of three kinds, because a scene-break flourish and a full-page map want completely different treatment.
- An ornament (separator). A small, uncaptioned picture sitting between two passages — a drawn scene break. Small means no more than three lines deep and no wider than half the text measure. See Scene breaks and ornaments.
- An inline picture. A normal figure in the flow of the chapter, with or without a caption.
- A full-page plate. A picture large enough to take a page of its own.
The Pictures settings
The formatter's settings have a Pictures panel that sets the default for the whole book:
- Print captions — on by default. Turning it off keeps the caption text in your file but leaves it off the printed page.
- Full-page pictures start on — either side, a right-hand page, or a left-hand page. Forcing a side inserts a blank page when the picture would otherwise land on the wrong one, so "either side" is the economical choice.
- How far a full-page picture reaches — to the text margins, near the trim edge, or past it. Be careful with past the edge: that makes every page in the book a bleed page and changes how you upload it. See Does the interior PDF include bleed?
- Fit or fill — fit shows the whole picture and may leave space around it; fill covers the area and crops whatever doesn't fit.
Any single picture can be set differently — click it in the preview and change just that one. The panel is the default, not a rule.
Resolution
The formatter prints the picture you gave it. A 72-DPI screenshot dropped into Word will look soft on paper no matter what happens here, so put the best version you have into the manuscript before you upload it. As a rough guide, a picture printed 4 inches wide wants to be about 1,200 pixels across.
In the EPUB
Pictures are real <img> elements in the ebook, listed in the file's manifest. Ornaments are sized in em rather than pixels, so they scale with the reader's chosen text size instead of sitting there as a fixed lump.
Alt text comes from the picture's own description in Word — the one you set in Word's Edit Alt Text pane. That's worth filling in: it's what a screen reader announces, and it's the difference between an ebook that says "scene break" and one that says nothing. See Is my EPUB accessible?
What's still a poor fit
Carrying pictures faithfully is not the same as being a layout program. A photo book, a children's picture book, or an illustrated cookbook — anything where the design is the pictures and the text flows around them — still wants dedicated layout software. See Can it format images, tables, footnotes, or poetry?