[Hitch]

Originally Posted by SBT

To get a nice kindle ebook with a proper TOC and front page, have the following three elements in the <guide> section of the opf file:

<reference href="Text/Chapter-00001.html" title="Cover Page" type="cover"/>
<reference href="toc.html" title="Content" type="toc"/>
<reference href="Text/Section0004.html" title="Main Text" type="text"/>

To get the thumbnail cover to show properly, you apparently have to have in the metadata section:

<meta name="cover" content="cover-image.jpg"/>

Please don't put a cover.html file in a MOBI. If you do that, your clients will end up--possibly--with the dreaded "double-cover" if they upload at Amazon. A Kindle book should be built, from an ePUB, (or HTML files, or, or, or) sans a cover.html file, but rather with the cover file identified through the metadata in the OPF, strictly as the image. The KG process will build the book and correctly place the cover, with the guide items intact.

My first attempt to make a nice-looking KF8 book is here. If I remember correctly, the files are identical for the epub and mobi versions, and I use @media tags to handle the differences between epub and mobi, and the differences between kf8 eink and kf8 fire (don't get me started on that issue...)
I prefer using

kgen content.opf

, but that's probably just because of a superstitious wish to operate as close to the source files as possible.

P.S. Don't trust the Kindle previewer too much. Though pretty good at recreating the device outputs, it doesn't recognize @media tags, and it does not permit the user to change line spacing and margins, changing which can have dramatic consequences for the more daring CSS expressions.

P.P.S: And remember: KF8 does not support page-break-inside:avoid, has a broken interpretation of relative widths, a broken implementation of float, no way of overriding user-set line-spacing. And in addition to different rendering for e-ink and Fire, there are also some subtle differences between Fire DX and Fire HDX.

Neither Kindlegen nor Previewer ignore media-queries. What media-queries are you trying to use that you think are being ignored by Previewer?

Users can't set line-spacing in KF8 except as allowed by some, not all devices. That's why it can't override it. There are some very NOT subtle differences between HDX and DX and the Fire. However, I have yet to find real differences between the Previewer and devices, other than the font limitations imposed by Previewer for the Fire.

@Alex:

When you say, "AZW3," you mean, KF8. If your files are being accepted at Amazon, it means that you are not using any of the KF8 capabilities, more or less. If you were using the KF8-type coding, then you'd be running into issues at Amazon. You cannot upload an AZW3 file at the KDP. You must upload a MOBI, or one of the other accepted formats.

Also, there is no reason on god's green earth to make a MOBI file out of one big HTML file, versus doing the same thing that you do for ePUB. We use our ePUB structure, in toto, for building MOBI files. For the same reasons, essentially, although we don't have the file-size limit in MOBI that we can run into in ePUB.

To make a file "work," that has varied bits--things that need to work one way for KF8, and another for e-ink--you're going to need to embrace media-queries, which are quite limited. It's a bit of an artform in and of itself, really--trying to get two very different-appearing results from what is a single source file (pre-KP/KG). If you're at that point, then Calibre isn't going to work for you any longer, most likely. I'm sorry, but you'll need to learn how to use media-queries in your CSS in order to get those things to function correctly across devices.

Hitch