As for guides or tools, well, the only ones I really ever needed were the PML reference pages on eReader’s website, and a text editor. Never saw the need to invest in eReader’s fancy automatic conversion software when I could get just as good results by hand. (But then, I also taught myself to code basic HTML by examining my lynx bookmarks file way back when.)

PML is really a simplified form of toggle-on, toggle-off tags, like HTML. It has a few quirks (like the toggle-off for centering having to be on a line by itself) but you can learn those pretty quickly and work around them.

Most of what I do, I do by search-and-replace logic. Any double quotation mark that comes after a space, a carriage return, or an italic or bold toggle will always be a left-double quote, and once you’ve replaced all those quotation marks with the left-quote symbol, any double quotation mark that is left will automatically be a right-double-quote.

Single-quotes are trickier because the same symbol is also an apostrophe and can also be used to denote foreshortened words. Unless there’s a lot of nested quoting in a book (or it’s British), it’s generally simplest just to do a manual find on each instance of “‘ or space-’ and replace the opening and closing ‘ marks by hand.

I also search-and-replace any double-hyphens with emdashes, and any triple-periods with ellipses, and so on. Then I compile it into a book, see how it looks, make any necessary changes, read through it, fix any errors, and recompile every so often, until I’m done.

And if you have time to answer them, I have a few questions regarding that. Do you format translators need any additional help? Are there are guides and/or tools that would help newbies get into making e-books that look decent and don’t suffer from excessive below-the-surface machinespeak? If so, where can we share our beautiful eReader creations? If not, in what other ways can someone like me help out?