Checking How Your Book Looks Across Devices While You Write

A style choice that reads fine on a wide monitor can look cramped on a phone or awkward on a printed page. Checking Device Preview as you go catches that early, instead of discovering it after export.

What You'll Need

• A document open with some real content in it, and your Styles set up roughly the way you want your finished book to look.

Step-by-Step

1. Open the Preview tab in the Inspector while working on a chapter you want to check.
2. Start with the device closest to how most readers will actually read your book. For most fiction, that's an e-reader like Kindle; for a print run, switch straight to Print instead.
3. Write normally. The preview catches up on its own after a short pause, so you don't need to trigger it manually.
4. Page through the chapter, not just glance at the first page. A long paragraph, a scene break, or a special block can look different once it's actually paginated than it does scrolling in the editor.
5. Switch devices to compare, especially if you're planning to export to more than one format. A chapter-opener image or a heading style that looks right on iPad might feel oversized on iPhone.
6. Adjust in Styles, not in the preview. The preview is read-only. If something looks wrong, go make the change in the Styles panel and watch the preview catch up automatically.

Common Mistakes

• Judging your whole book from one chapter's preview. The preview only shows the document you have open. Check a chapter with a scene break, one with a special block like Verse, and a title page separately, since they can behave differently from a plain text chapter.
• Expecting instant updates while typing. There's a brief pause built in so it doesn't try to re-render on every keystroke. If you don't see a change immediately, give it a second.
• Clicking a link inside the preview and expecting it to jump somewhere. Cross-document links don't resolve in a single-document preview. That's expected, and they'll work correctly once you actually export.
• Only ever checking Print (or only ever checking Kindle) when you're targeting both. They render through genuinely different engines with different pagination behavior. Check both if both matter for this manuscript.