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Old 06-19-2015, 12:34 PM   #16
JSWolf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AThirstyMind View Post
I've never gotten a double cover uploading an epub into KindlePreviewer for mobi conversion, but I have stumbled on another issue recently.

CSS errors, particularly those for Center and Flush. The following is a sample of the CSS entry of my normal paragraph style:

.msonormal {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-indent: 0.25in;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt

Then the styles that have gone off during conversion:

.center {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-align: center;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt

.flush {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-indent: 0;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt
Given that your ePub came from a Word document, I would suggest you go through all the XML code and the CSS and hand fix things that are in need of being fixed. A margin of .0001 is just silly. A text indent of .25in is wrong. There could very well be other things that need fixing. So before you make your Kindle eBook from your ePub, first make sure your ePub is fixed properly. That does not mean to just make sure it's error free. It's to make sure it's error free, the formatting is correct, and the code is very neat.
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Old 06-19-2015, 11:50 PM   #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AThirstyMind View Post
I've never gotten a double cover uploading an epub into KindlePreviewer for mobi conversion, but I have stumbled on another issue recently.

CSS errors, particularly those for Center and Flush. The following is a sample of the CSS entry of my normal paragraph style:

.msonormal {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-indent: 0.25in;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt

Then the styles that have gone off during conversion:

.center {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-align: center;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt

.flush {
display: block;
font-size: 1em;
text-indent: 0;
margin: 0 0 0.0001pt
I assume there are closing braces on those styles? Because if not, the parsing could be pretty nondeterministic.

Additionally, the line font-size: 1em is a no-op. It is saying that the font size should be 1 times the current font size, which is... the current font size. Just take that out globally wherever it appears.

Finally, Amazon's KDP tends to butcher content with sizes measured in points or pixels, e.g. that margin. It converts them to root ems, but that conversion process may result in wildly incorrect results, depending on context. I would drop it, but if you consider that tiny fraction of a pixel to be critical for some reason, add another 0 and change it to an em unit and call it "close enough".
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Old 06-20-2015, 05:40 AM   #18
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dgatwood View Post
Finally, Amazon's KDP tends to butcher content with sizes measured in points or pixels, e.g. that margin. It converts them to root ems, but that conversion process may result in wildly incorrect results, depending on context. I would drop it, but if you consider that tiny fraction of a pixel to be critical for some reason, add another 0 and change it to an em unit and call it "close enough".
That's interesting, thanks!

One of the workarounds for uploading Word docs, when the author-publisher wants the first paragraph (or indeed any paragraph) to have no indented first line, is to specify an indent of 0.01 inch, enough to satisfy Amazon that there IS an indent, but small enough to fool the reader into seeing none. This seems to work just fine. Is there any danger to it?

(Many or most author-publishers wouldn't touch html with a pica rule, so there's no point in recommending that approach!)
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Old 06-20-2015, 04:18 PM   #19
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn View Post
That's interesting, thanks!

One of the workarounds for uploading Word docs, when the author-publisher wants the first paragraph (or indeed any paragraph) to have no indented first line, is to specify an indent of 0.01 inch, enough to satisfy Amazon that there IS an indent, but small enough to fool the reader into seeing none. This seems to work just fine. Is there any danger to it?

(Many or most author-publishers wouldn't touch html with a pica rule, so there's no point in recommending that approach!)
That workaround was, IIRC, "way back" when people were trying to get that to happen with Word. Which is WEIRD as hell, given that it's ripped into HTML first--why the difference?

I've never had to use it for flush-left. Ever. (In fact, that's the infamous reason that the Tech Acct Mgr at KDP at Amazon first called me, in early 2010--they asked me how I was making flush-left first-paras. I didn't know it was a big deal, LOL. I gave them the CSS I had. I simply have a style that doesn't have an indent. Cheerfully, that phone convo and the few that followed were how I got on their list. Of course, NOT so cheerfully, it's also how they asked me to donate time at the KDP forums to help DIY'ers, which after 5 years, I've now given up doing. Sorry, I digress...). Of course, I never did make eBooks from Word; even when I first started, I was using MBPC, from HTML, no matter how bad my HTML was, in the aughts.

So...I don't think that there's any reason to try to use that any longer. Maybe, if you're using Word (don't know if that's been fixed or not), but certainly not in HTML, XHTML, ePUB, etc.

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Old 06-21-2015, 02:34 AM   #20
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I don't remember the details, but a couple of times I've had to specify a 0.001px border to have ADE position a drop-cap image correctly. Without the border the spacing was wrong. An example here.
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Old 06-21-2015, 05:47 AM   #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
So...I don't think that there's any reason to try to use that any longer. Maybe, if you're using Word (don't know if that's been fixed or not), but certainly not in HTML, XHTML, ePUB, etc.
Apparently it's not been fixed, because someone on the KDP community board was complaining the other day that the KDP conversion resolutely indented his first paragraphs even though he hadn't indented them. So I suggested the 0.01 workaround. He hasn't been back, so I trust it still works.

As you know, there's a huge slice of the self-pub world that insists on using Word for formatting e-books. Indeed, there's a significant slice that heralds it as the ideal way. I like to help the former, if I can, even if it's only to suggest a kludge like 0.01"
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Old 06-23-2015, 02:21 PM   #22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn View Post
Apparently it's not been fixed, because someone on the KDP community board was complaining the other day that the KDP conversion resolutely indented his first paragraphs even though he hadn't indented them. So I suggested the 0.01 workaround. He hasn't been back, so I trust it still works.

As you know, there's a huge slice of the self-pub world that insists on using Word for formatting e-books. Indeed, there's a significant slice that heralds it as the ideal way. I like to help the former, if I can, even if it's only to suggest a kludge like 0.01"
Oh, yes--I never meant to imply that it was "fixed" for Word, because I'm not sure it's BROKEN for Word. The default is the default. Simply "not" indenting a paragraph doesn't necessarily convey, via the HTML, that it is flush-left, does it? I mean...(sorry, thinking aloud a bit here), if you have a paragraph class of Normal (which all MS docs do), and it has the default standard indent, and then you create "regular" with an indent, and what, a third class, "first," for non-indented? Is he saying that's what he did, and KDP ignored his class FIRST, and indented it anyway? OR, is he saying that he simply didn't style it AS indented?

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Old 06-24-2015, 06:37 AM   #23
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I've been following the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists for the past three months, to analyze the odd KDP book that makes it onto the list. (The NYT is too grand to include self-published books in its lists.) Six novels and one non-fiction memoir have made it onto the list in all that time. The novels have all been professionally formatted and designed (often by the same team), and all incidentally are what I believe is called romantica, about chicks finding hot guys.

The non-fiction book however was more interesting, a memoir by Donna Mobry of her grandmother, both called Maude. Whereas the chick-lit novels were all on the list for only the one week, Maude was there for, I think, five weeks in a row.

Anyhow, the point being: Ms Mobry did not indent the first paragraph in a chapter. It was otherwise neatly formatted. I suspect she uploaded a Word doc, and the defaults took over. (The Look Inside was ragged right, as happens occasionally even with Big Five e-books. The downloaded book was justified.)
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Old 06-24-2015, 01:48 PM   #24
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn View Post
I've been following the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists for the past three months, to analyze the odd KDP book that makes it onto the list. (The NYT is too grand to include self-published books in its lists.) Six novels and one non-fiction memoir have made it onto the list in all that time. The novels have all been professionally formatted and designed (often by the same team), and all incidentally are what I believe is called romantica, about chicks finding hot guys.

The non-fiction book however was more interesting, a memoir by Donna Mobry of her grandmother, both called Maude. Whereas the chick-lit novels were all on the list for only the one week, Maude was there for, I think, five weeks in a row.

Anyhow, the point being: Ms Mobry did not indent the first paragraph in a chapter. It was otherwise neatly formatted. I suspect she uploaded a Word doc, and the defaults took over. (The Look Inside was ragged right, as happens occasionally even with Big Five e-books. The downloaded book was justified.)
OR, because it was published by Createspace (formatted?), possibly she bought a conversion from them? If you have it, why don't you rip it open and let us know what you find, nj?

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