Importing

What is read from your file, how chapters are found, and what is reported as lost.

What can be imported

.docx from Word, and Markdown (.md, .markdown, .txt).

How chapters are found

This decides whether the import takes a minute or an afternoon.

If you used Word’s heading styles, they are read directly: Heading 1 is a chapter, Heading 2 is a section inside it, Title is the book’s title.

If you did not, the words are read instead. A line on its own reading Chapter Four, Chapitre 4, Part Two, Prologue or XIV is recognised as a chapter opening. The recognition covers English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, and it accepts arabic numerals, roman numerals and numbers spelled out.

A third path catches the rest: if your manuscript opens with a contents listing, the titles in that listing are matched against the lines of the book, and where they line up, those lines become chapters. The listing itself is then removed, so you do not import a page of empty chapter stubs.

Check the chapter count first

The panel reports how many chapters were found before the book is created. Compare it to what your book actually has:

It says	What it means	What to do
The right number	Heading styles or wording were recognised	Nothing
1	No heading styles and no recognisable chapter wording	Import anyway, then split in the editor
Far too many	Something looks like a chapter title and is not — usually scene breaks typed as short centred lines	Import anyway and merge, or fix the styles in Word first

What survives

Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough. Footnotes, with their text, matched to where they are called from. Lists, including nested ones and their numbering. Tables. Images stored in the document. Charts.

What is left behind

The page. Your Word file states a page size, margins, paragraph indents and line spacing. None of it is imported, because a Word page and a book page are different objects: a manuscript is A4 or Letter with a wide measure and a 12-point face, and a novel is none of those.

The typeface, type size, line spacing and paragraph indent are read, and become a starting point you change in Formatting.

What gets reported

Anything that could not be brought across is listed before the book is created, and again afterwards.

Report	Cause	Fix
A linked image	Added in Word with Link to File rather than Insert, so the picture is not inside the file	Re-insert it in Word, or place it in Nueel
An image over 30 MB	Too large to import	Save a smaller copy and place it in Nueel
A font that cannot be used	The typeface cannot be embedded in a book	Choose another in Formatting
Footnotes with no call	The reference was deleted but the note text remains in the file	Retype the call where it belongs
Unusually long sections	Over ~6,000 words with no heading inside — nearly always unstyled headings	Split in the editor

A note with no call is dropped rather than imported, because a note nothing points at is unreachable in a book. The count is always reported: these are your words, so they are never dropped quietly.

Markdown

# headings become the structure. YAML front matter at the top (title, subtitle, author) is read into the book’s details.

Two behaviours specific to Markdown: a Project Gutenberg header and licence block is detected and removed, and image references are kept as captions rather than pictures, because a .md file carries no image data.

After the import

Read the first chapter and the last one, checking that italics survived, scene breaks are there, and chapters begin where they should.

Then go to Themes.