KF8 on Fire HD6 - Justification & Font Issues

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by cybmole

good to know but I agree that it is most perplexing, & how on earth did you stumble onto that as the fix ?

It is very odd! I discovered the solution through lots and LOTS of trial-and-error. I've lost count of the number of files I've uploaded to KDP since mid-February!

When I fixed the first e-book, I initially thought perhaps KDP had made a global change in file processing that solved the problem. To test that, I re-uploaded an earlier version of the same e-book that didn't specify a body font. It still had auto-hyphenation. After new uploads fixed my other three e-books, I was elated!

have you asked amazon to confirm & comment?

No, I haven't been in touch with KDP since they stopped communicating about my problems a month ago.

I wonder if this works retrospectively e.g. if I had a sample (with auto-hyphenation) to hand ( I think I deleted them) , and I added your CSS via the calibre AZW3 editor, then maneuvered the edited book back on to the Kindle, would the hyphenation vanish?
If anyone does have the patience to test that, I'd love to know the result

I don't use Calibre, so I can't experiment with that. That may not be a valid test, however, since my own e-books only displayed auto-hyphenation, darker/less-crisp text, and smaller graphics AFTER the books were published by KDP. Pre-publication testing on my Fire HD6 never showed those problems, and they weren't evident on their online previewer either.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DreamWriter

My four e-books are now free of auto-hyphenation and other problems mentioned in this thread!

The solution was both simple and perplexing. I just added this to the ePub CSS:

body {font-family:"Bookerly", "Caecilia", serif;}

There is no font specified for main text otherwise (only titles and chapter headings), and the reader can still select their preferred paragraph font from the device's font menu, which is important to me.

For chapter headings and titles, {font-family:"Helvetica", sans-serif;} worked, but I later embedded fonts for those.

In the past, I did not specify a body font at all. This was never a problem for files I'd uploaded prior to mid-February 2015, but after that time the omission caused the following problems on several devices (Fire HD6, Fire HDX 8.9, and 2013 Fire HD7):

• Auto-hyphenation
• Darker, less crisp fonts
• Smaller, fuzzier chapter graphics and author photo

It feels SO good to have my books appear the way I intended again! I hope this information will help someone else.

I thank you all for your patience and generous assistance. Your efforts were truly appreciated!

I want to add, that I'm extremely pleased for you, BUT:

Just the past few days, we've noticed that EVERY FONT, of every kind, whether put on the HTML (inline), CSS, added for the body, bodysection, individual elements, (etc. ad infinitum) has been getting completely ripped out, in toto, by Amazon.

I was in communication with them starting late on Friday (at 5:05, naturally, when we confirmed that it was not a freak incident with one book), over the entirety of the weekend. I don't think that THEY know what's causing it. The problem seemed intermittent on Saturday.

Dreamwriter:

You got your book through? So, as of the post step-6, your book has fonts? If you make it that far, it seems you're home free, and then use that mobi as your "final."

What a giant PITA. As "youse guys" know, we do a ton of white label, which means a TON of fonts, and we've had agita since Friday on this.


Hitch

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I want to add, that I'm extremely pleased for you, BUT:

Just the past few days, we've noticed that EVERY FONT, of every kind, whether put on the HTML (inline), CSS, added for the body, bodysection, individual elements, (etc. ad infinitum) has been getting completely ripped out, in toto, by Amazon.

I was in communication with them starting late on Friday (at 5:05, naturally, when we confirmed that it was not a freak incident with one book), over the entirety of the weekend. I don't think that THEY know what's causing it. The problem seemed intermittent on Saturday.

Dreamwriter:

You got your book through? So, as of the post step-6, your book has fonts? If you make it that far, it seems you're home free, and then use that mobi as your "final."

What a giant PITA. As "youse guys" know, we do a ton of white label, which means a TON of fonts, and we've had agita since Friday on this.


Hitch

Hitch, the new development you're reporting is very troubling—and exasperating!

Yes, my four e-books now have embedded chapter/title fonts and the "called" body fonts specified earlier, in both downloadable samples and purchased books. No fonts were stripped from those e-books, and the Publisher Font option is available in the device menu once again. However, the last files I uploaded for my four e-books were sent to KDP between March 31 and April 3—well before you noticed the new problem.

It's gotten to the point that I'm reluctant to upload updated files to KDP since the results are so unpredictable. It'll be "interesting" to see what happens when I publish my next book in a few months. I definitely won't update the back matter in my other e-books at that time unless the problem's fixed!

[DreamWriter]

As I reported in this thread on April 13, I was able to rid my four ebooks of KDP-imposed automatic hyphenation and font/graphic quality issues in late March after struggling to find the solution for 1½ months.

Yesterday (about two months after I initially contacted KDP about those problems in my recently updated ebooks), I received the following email from the lead KDP Technical Services member investigating my case. I thought some of you may be interested in their reply (emphasis mine).

Hello,

Thanks for your continued patience while I was working with the concerned department in search for an explanation!

Here is the explanation received:

"We are always in the process of upgrading both our Kindle reading apps as well as our book catalog. Some of the changes currently being introduced are automatic hyphenation for supported Latin languages, typographic drop capitals, and normalization of line height. This may produce some variation in appearance among your books or for the same book on different reader apps or devices. It is not necessary for you to take any corrective action as this is not a defect in the submitted book. Your book will automatically receive the enhanced presentation for enabled reader apps/devices once it has been updated in our catalog."

I hope this explanation is clear. Thanks for using Amazon KDP!

What???

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DreamWriter

As I reported in this thread on April 13, I was able to rid my four ebooks of KDP-imposed automatic hyphenation and font/graphic quality issues in late March after struggling to find the solution for 1½ months.

Yesterday (about two months after I initially contacted KDP about those problems in my recently updated ebooks), I received the following email from the lead KDP Technical Services member investigating my case. I thought some of you may be interested in their reply (emphasis mine).



What???

Waaaahhhl....

I wonder if that explains the horror of the last few weeks, since ~4/10?

Hitch

[tomsem]

I have a different perspective on all of this. Typographic improvements (as enumerated by KDP Technical Services) are long overdue, as these features (or lack of bugs in the case of the drop caps and line spacing) have existed on competing platforms for years now.

Of course, they need to document how to selectively turn off hyphenation (in headings and so forth), and it would be nice if that were also a user preference, but I'm weary of seeing crappy drop caps and irregularly spaced lines, and miss hyphenation. It shouldn't be up to publishers to blindly discover how to develop workarounds for the current limitations of Kindle reading apps, when the same HTML/CSS looks great in iBooks or the average RMSDK/Readium reading app. At any rate publishers by and large have proven they are not interested in doing any of that. It's time for Amazon to do something.

I can appreciate that the changes they are (more or less secretly) making have people tearing their hair out here but I think it will be for the better in the end.

[Notjohn]

I've been reading books on a three-inch screen (held horizontally) since I bought an iPhone 3 five or six years ago. I would much rather see the occasional short line or (less frequent now than formerly) obviously spaced-out words than the mad hyphens I encountered in a recent book.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

I've been reading books on a three-inch screen (held horizontally) since I bought an iPhone 3 five or six years ago. I would much rather see the occasional short line or (less frequent now than formerly) obviously spaced-out words than the mad hyphens I encountered in a recent book.

Yes, I've seen the 'mad hyphens' with the iOS app, though I no longer use my iPod Touch and its 3.5" screen, where I used to see such things. Obviously that is automatic hyphenation done wrong (and perhaps some artifact of webkit that Amazon did not intend). But presumably that is not what Amazon is working on (it requires very little work to do bad hyphenation). And I have looked at several of the texts cited on this thread on my Fire HD6 and the hyphenation I've seen in them looks good to me.

[tomsem]

The latest update to the iOS app (4.9) appears to have brought some of the aforementioned improvements ("Some of the changes currently being introduced are automatic hyphenation for supported Latin languages, typographic drop capitals, and normalization of line height."). The 'normalization of line height' is what I notice most so far.

Hyphenation in particular is not (yet?) ubiquitous, but is present in some of the examples given previously in this thread (e.g. "The Gemini Effect"). In that book, the hyphenation appears to be 'correct' (i.e. breaks at a location that agrees with syllables shown in dictionary). Search does find all instances of the word, hyphenated or not.

It's not clear what it takes for 'typographic drop capitals'. The books I've looked at so far that have them are not improved. Maybe this only applies to newly submitted books, or maybe they have plans to 'recompile' existing books over time for this.

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Yes, I've seen the 'mad hyphens' with the iOS app, though I no longer use my iPod Touch and its 3.5" screen, where I used to see such things. Obviously that is automatic hyphenation done wrong (and perhaps some artifact of webkit that Amazon did not intend). But presumably that is not what Amazon is working on (it requires very little work to do bad hyphenation). And I have looked at several of the texts cited on this thread on my Fire HD6 and the hyphenation I've seen in them looks good to me.

Actually, those mad hyphens were on my Fire HD. I think the book was David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge.

If the auto-hyphenation is syllabic, that will still violate good bookmaking rules. I don't worry about this myself, but the Chicago Manual is very prim on the subject. (I manually hyphenate print editions. If it doesn't look good to me, I find a workaround. I figure that looks good to me after all these years is probably as sound as Chicago Rules.)