I have had a breakthrough in getting the WORD doc file into a proper Kindle format! It requires a manual adjustment to the WORD-produced html file. Here is a procedure for fixing the WORD output:
1. I can write in WORD…carefully avoiding extra fonts and setting all styles to Times New Roman.
2. When I’m really, really done, I have WORD save as filtered html
3. I open the html file in Wordpad…NEVER go back to WORD from here or it will put all the deleted stuff back!
4. I cut out all the font definitions except Times New Roman…this deletes a huge part of the file since I have hundreds of fonts installed on my computer.
5. I go through the style definitions and delete all my unused ones…again I have a lot of styles that are not in use in the document in question.
6. The remaining…hopefully only a few…styles I edit so wherever there is a reference to a point size I replace it with an em size…the conversion is 12pt=1em. I may investigate the % operator in the future.
7. I save the file from Wordpad (just use ctrl S so it saves by the same name as it came in…with an html extension).(Someone told me before to do this but the inability to save a new file from Wordpad with an html extension stopped me)
8. Have Kindle previewer/kindlegen convert the html file and view the book. NOW the paperwhite preview allows changes to font sizes.
(It still doesn’t change fonts like it should, but I assume there are some other changes to the html that will fix that…the amazing thing is that a number of the warnings in the compile process are now gone and the result works while keeping the footnote links.)