Amazon! Curse them and crush them! May their screens break and their batteries explode! May their programmers get stuck in infinite loops, and their executives be dismissed with cause!
Amazon! Blast them and bash them!
They bought Mobipocket for the ebook format. And then they produced a gadget that doesn't render that format properly. And then they release software built on the old Mobipocket software that
does render it properly!!!
Curse them and crush them! They've made a right mess of this. What incompetent idiot managed to mess up one of the most basic things in rendering HTML — font size.
Font size in a Mobipocket file could be specified two ways:
- An absolute size, 1 to 7, so that the following text's font size doesn't depend at all on the previous bit of text's font size. Specify Size 2 and Size 2 was what you got.
- A relative size, -6 to +6, so that the follow text's font size depends on the previous text's font size. If the previous text was Size 2, specifying Size +3 would make the next bit of text Size 5.
And Amazon have cocked up this simple scheme completely. On a Kindle, specify (say) Size -2 and you always get Size 1 text. It doesn't matter what size the previous bit of text was — you always get size 1. Specify size +1 and you always get Size 4 text.
A really bad idea, but having done such a silly thing, they then released Kindle for Windows and the Kindle for Mac. These render font sizes like the old Mobipocket software! Arghhhhh!
So a Kindle book, compiled from valid HTML source by Amazon's KindleGen, can look VERY different on a Kindle and on Kindle for PC.
It's not as if they haven't had lots of opportunities to fix it — they have released significant firmware updates. But no. It's still there. It's probably there in the Kindle 3.
How am I suppose to generate an excellent Kindle eBook if it isn't going to be rendered the same on different Kindle viewers FROM THE SAME COMPANY!!!!
Curse Amazon! Blast them and Bash them! How could they mess up something so basic!