I do not understand this issue a customer is having with one of our ebooks... The book is "25 bridge conventions you should know Part 1: Learn these first".
I downloaded the sample for the "Kindle for PC" application, and this is what I see:
http://www.luiselee.com/images/my%20screenshot.jpg
But the customer sees something completely different:
http://www.luiselee.com/images/his%20screenshot.jpg
Both of us are reading the exact same book and using the exact same software appliation.
Does anyone have any ideas on what might cause this odd behaviour? I sent him the symbol.ttf file just in case he didn't have it on his computer (unlikely) but he had the exact same file on his computer. The only differece I could see was our operating system -- he was on Windows Vista, and we are on Windows 7.
The process we have used to create the ebooks is:
1) encode the suit symbols in our html files like: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ in the style sheet, font family is set as "font family: sans-serif;". We do not embed any fonts.
2) Use Calibre to convert our .epub file to .mobi
3) Transfer the .mobi file to the kindle device for testing... everything looks beautiful at this stage.
4) Upload the .mobi file to Amazon at kdp.amazon.com
Amazon has told me that my file is incorrectly formatted... They have said:
"I checked the content of your title "25 Bridge Conventions You Should Know - Part 1: Learn These First" and I can confirm the presence of the formatting issue.
This is caused due to the incorrect character set that you've used before converting your content into the AZW/MOBI format. If you used HTML to format your content, before converting your content to MOBI, please open the HTML file in Notepad and save it with "Encoding: ANSI" (this is an option in the 'Save As' Notepad dialog). On non-Windows platforms, make sure to save it as ANSI or ASCII, avoiding 'UTF-8' or 'Unicode' as the encoding type.
Further, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing supports text in the 'Latin-1' (ISO-8859-1) format and all characters in that character set. "
(The suit symbols show up properly on the device when I convert the file to .mobi and then load it directly to our Kindle!).
PLEASE HELP! I am pulling my hair out trying to find a solution to this issue.
(I posted this addition in the thread when I discovered this additional information:
Okay just to add to the confusion and throw another thing out there...
I downloaded the sample file for my Kindle for PC application 1.6.1 -- sample looks perfect, as I mentioned before...
HOWEVER -- then I BOUGHT the book, and guess what?? I see the boxes instead of the charaters. SAME book -- same file. sample works, purchased book does NOT work. (Imagine my frustration as a customer seeing this?).
Our kindle for testing in the office has walked away on us and I can't confirm this in house -- we're working on borrowing someone's Kindle to buy the actual book to see what happens. But if the same thing happens on the device when we BUY the book, then this is a complete disaster! )