Full vs left justification in prc/Kindle
 

Ok,
So I just reformatted an Gutenberg text, and for some reason, it's showing up on my Kindle as left justified. I'm sure I can go back into MS Word and justify it, and it will then convert properly. But, I don't want to force any sort of justification - I want it to default to what the Kindle uses (full) but allow the user to shift it to left justification if they so choose.

I've been doing all my formatting, bookmarking (anchors) and hyperlinking within Word, and I suspect what I'd need to do, is open up the HTML file, and remove any sort of justification tags that Word stuck in there. Does that seem right?

Are you sure that Kindle defaults to full justification? I've bought two books since I've owned mine, one is fully justified and the other only justified on the left side.

Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will respond to your inquiry, but if it were me, I'd master Book Designer and format Gutenberg texts that way which would take care of the full justification problem.

Jim

"I'd need to do, is open up the HTML file, and remove any sort of justification tags that Word stuck in there. Does that seem right?"

Ok, I figured it out. I needed to remove the following two tags:

text-align:Left
text-align:Justify

First, I just removed the first tag from the "normal paragraph" style (can you tell I've only got the barest understanding of CSS?) and then my file showed up as full justified on the Kindle. But the problem was that it was now FORCED full justify; in other words, I couldn't change it to left justifed, via the font size menu (hit alt-j while that menu is up, and it will allow you to change the justification). So I went back in, and found the second code above in a different paragraph style, and removed that. It now defaults to full justification, but I can change it to left justified on the Kindle if I want to.

Well, the Kindle does default to Full. However, depending on the HTML and CSS within the PRC file, it might be forced to be left justified or forced to be full. If there is no alignment specified, the Kindle will full justify it, and you can change it back and forth.

I'm fortunate in that I know HTML, at least an early flavor of it (I haven't worked with it in 6+ years). I'm not at all familiar with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which came into widespread use after I quit doing that kind of work. But my husband is a software developer, and was able to help. I found the tags I needed, and he showed me what styles they were referring to. I NOW know enough that I can correct it on my own going forward.

Book Designer is the root of the problem, Jim; it forces full justification. Open any BD file and you'll see that all the text is in <DIV align=justify> tags.

What you need to do get a "proper" Mobi/Kindle book is to export from BD to HTML, strip out all the justification tags, then use Mobi Creator to create your book. That way the user will be able to select left/full justification as required.

This is in essence what I did - I exported out of Word to an htm file, then opened that up in notepad, found the problem tags and removed them, then used mobi to build the file.

I really need to re-load Dreamweaver on my machine.

What are the advantages of using Book Designer, over Word? Word does what I want pretty easily, I know the software, etc. Would BD be more efficient?

The only advantage of BD is that it supports multiple output formats. Otherwise it is not a very good tool. Dedicated tools for the format you are interested in are almost always better. For mobi use mobicreator, for imp use eBook Publisher.

Dale

Its benefits are basically:

1. It's VERY good for creating Sony LRF books.

2. If you're creating a Sony LRF book, you can then export from BD as HTML and use that to create a nice MobiPocket book.

3. It's specifically a BOOK creation tool and has nice options for automatically creating a table of contents, and other such "book-ish" things.

I use it for all the books that I post. I use BD directly for the Sony books, then export to MobiPocket Creator to get the Mobi versions.

you can set the conversion output in calibre
 

there's a setting in calibre look & feel where you can set the conversion output to 1 of 3 settings, original, left align or justify. you want justify. don't justify the .doc file.

by the way, for reformating, i use openoffice writer because calibre supports the .odt text format.

another thought, after my kindle 2 installed the 2.5,2 update a justified ebook displayed incorrectly with some lines not right justified (however most lines are displayed correctly, just some are not). perhaps this is the problem you are experiencing?
--
Alan :D

In 2.5.2 Amazon has gone back to their original algorithm for right justifying: No more than two spaces between words, and if the line requires extra empty spaces, they come at the end of the line. It makes a better looking page, IMO, than having the extra spaces in the middle of the line when a right-justify-at-all-costs algorithm is adopted.

I've often wondered if it makes a difference in the speed of the page refresh.

Jim

we differ on preference
 

jim....well we sure do differ on preference. in my opinion they need to abandon the change or even better abandon it and add on-the-fly hyphenation.
--
Alan :D