Encoding: UTF-8 ot Latin1?

[philsmobi]

I've always used UTF-8. That is what the standard is, that is what passes the validators.

However, I was troubleshooting an issue the other day and came across this page from Amazon that says:

...make sure to save it as ANSI or ASCII, avoiding 'UTF-8' or 'Unicode' as the encoding type.

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing supports text in the 'Latin-1' (ISO-8859-1) format and all characters in that character set.

Please be sure to check that all the text you enter in the product info is therefore compliant with the Latin-1 character set.

So, now I am confused about what to encode Kindle products with.

Someone at KDP community suggested UTF-8 is the desired encoding, and that this Amazon page was either entirely inaccurate, or at least poorly worded.

Thoughts?

[pholy]

Considering that epubs require UTF8, and Kindlegen will accept epubs for conversion, I'd let Kindlegen worry about it. Are you sure you're looking at the most recent doc from Amazon?

Unless Hitch says otherwise.

[philsmobi]

That sounds about as good a plan as any. I can't determine the creation date of that web page.

Also found this in the KDP guide dated March 2013:

The source of a Kindle book can be encoded in many different ways. All encodi
ngs are supported, provided that
•The encoding of the HTML files is clearly stated in the HTML and
• The computer used for compiling the sources supports the encoding and knows how to convert it
to UNICODE

So I'm going to roll with UTF-8.

[Doitsu]

The information on the website is definitely outdated. BTW, I'd strongly recommend using Sigil to create your Kindle books, because it offers several features that are very useful for creating Kindle books:

- Automatic HTML TOC generation from NCX TOC
- Easy <guide> item definition (Cover, Start Reading Location, TOC) etc.
- Easy-to-use metadata editor
- Integrated validator etc.

(Kindle Previewer accepts ePub files as input files and KDP in turn will of course accept MOBI files generated from ePub files.)

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by philsmobi

That sounds about as good a plan as any. I can't determine the creation date of that web page.

Also found this in the KDP guide dated March 2013:

So I'm going to roll with UTF-8.

Well, yes, Phil, and, you overlooked this part of the original quote, from the older Help pages:

On non-Windows platforms, make sure to save it as ANSI or ASCII, avoiding 'UTF-8' or 'Unicode' as the encoding type.

And that was all for troubleshooting. What Amazon was really trying to discuss on that page was using the standard character set, and not using a boatload of unsupported keyboard-created characters (these are amazingly prevalent and heavily used on Macs). FWIW, I don't run into encoding issues here, and we deal with scads of Windows-genned Win-1252 files all the time.


I'm with Doits; use Sigil. It does all the pesky encoding quite nicely, and plays well with Kindlegen. Works a treat. Stick within the supported Latin-1 charset, OR, embed a font that has the characters you want, if you need them. You should be fine. (At least you actually read the Formatter's Guide and the Help pages. That puts you in the top 5% of newbs. Seriously. Maybe even the top 2%. )

Hitch