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Originally Posted by dgatwood
Has there been any progress in this area? I just submitted three books to KDP in MOBI format, produced by KindleGen, and the "Preview Copy" that KDP send back had literally every font missing. It looks like for books with significant KF8 content, Amazon KDP's ingest process is broken beyond all repair at this point.
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@dgatwood:
No. I don't actually recall everything discussed in this thread; we're pretty well deep into it, ourselves, as we're one of the few commercial firms that will do fonts at all, so...
I can tell you that I just had a replication of the disaster I reported about some messages back, with a book with a serif, a sans-serif, and a "fancy" or display-type font (god help me, Chiller. You can't make this stuff up). All in, 7 total faces (reg, ital, bold for ea. serif and sans-serif) and Chiller. The book was stripped, stem-to-stern. We remade it just under 100x, trying everything we'd learned from the first disaster (not much, mind you, as troubleshooting doesn't seem to provide any sensible answers). Long story short, we ended up doing a serif + Chiller, removing the sans-serif.
There seems to be something--and this is pure speculation, as we've never been able to really GET anything from all the weeks of effort on this--that is a limit of some kind. We KNOW, factually, that there's a span limit of some type. We know that from the testing we did before; at some point, X number of spans "breaks" the book. (e.g., "span style="blabbety", at least, for FONT styling spans). We also know, factually, that this makes NO sense, because INDD-output ePUBs-->MOBI are loaded with spans, that don't seem to break the book.
My working theory is, there's a bug at the KDP that's triggered by encountering...SOMETHING. But the issue is, with so many variables, it's almost impossible to figure out what the hell that is. We have even gotten the point of testing with 3 paragraphs, one header and STILL can't figure out what triggers this odd behavior.
I also don't know if it's something in the CSS. (If you recall the issue that prompted the "help" thread, that was the first around this). We've tried to eliminate all the possibilities, in that arena, as well.
It's like bad aviation accidents--there are, I think, 3 things that have to somehow come together, to make it happen, but I don't know what those three things ARE. I never see this behavior with serif fonts, for example; we only seem to run into it when either:
--A particular font ITSELF doesn't work; e.g., Papyrus. If you replace the font, the problem is fixed, or,
--You have serif, sans-serif, and a display font. When this happens, nothing we try ever seems to "fix" the desired outcome.
We see this when we are using two fonts that work perfectly well (the serif and sans) in other books. So...something about adding the third font just causes chaos.
n.b.: both of the books that had massive issues with this, the second case in my short list above, had MASSIVE amounts of font interspersion, by which I mean, a lot of bold spans (b or spans) inside regular fonts, and a LOT of switching back and forth between serif and sans. So, many changes from font a to font b, and many changes from font a reg to font a italic or bold. I don't know if this is part of the issue, but our troubleshooting SEEMS to indicate that this stripping behavior persists, even if we are down to 3 paragraphs, one header and nothing else. Therefore, I don't THINK it's the number of changes from a to b, GENERALLY.
I'm sorry--I wish I knew more. I'm in the process of preparing yet another lengthy email to Amazon, with all our tests, advising "we tried this, we observed that, this happened, that didn't happen..." to see if they'll get back with us on it. They never did on the last one. Honestly--I think we may actually know more about it than they do, which is sad, because we know, to my mind, next-to-nothing.
Oh, a third/fourth instance: OTF is always a problem, so if you've tried OTF, convert them to TTF, and give that a go, or find a "true" TTF that's similar, and try that. Secondly, Adobe fonts are almost ALWAYS stripped, for some reason, I know not why. There's a guy on the KDP that has this quasi-consipiracy theory that all MS and Adobe fonts are being stripped, due to copyright (licensing) issues, but my experience doesn't support that idea; I've tested that pretty thoroughly, and it's not MS, certainly.
Sorry--wish I had more for you. What fonts were you trying, if I may ask?
Hitch