[DreamWriter]

Thanks, Hitch! I'll address your questions individually below.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Hi:

A couple of questions/ponderments:
[*]Can you remove "font-weight:normal" and tell us if that has any effect? I know it shouldn't--I'm just asking.

I did try that earlier this week, and it made no difference. Actually, Last Mulligan is the only one of my three e-books that currently has that code in the paragraph CSS. The other three books do not have paragraph font weight specified, and recently uploaded versions of those are also displaying text darker than before (on the Fire HD6; Android Kindle app is fine).

[*]Also, the font-sizing mechanism, for the chapter heads--can you try that in ems? Rather than 240%, can you try 2.5ems, and see if that alters anything much?

I can certainly try that, but I've always specified the chapter font/headings as a percentage, and it always worked fine before this week's uploads. Same fonts as before. The font size is displaying correctly. Both chapter and paragraph fonts are too dark only on the Fire HD6 now, whereas they used to be fine. All fonts still look good in the Android Kindle app.

I should point out that the current downloadable sample of Last Mulligan has a font weight of 600, which is too bold. As I recall, 500 seemed to work fine, but I don't want to change it back to test until I hear from KDP again. It used to be font-weight:bold; which now comes out extra-bold on the Fire HD6, so that's when I changed it to 500/600.

[*] What happens if you set the body to a serif? Not a specific font, just a font-family:serif? Does that change anything?

I haven't tried that. Since everything looks fine in KDP's online previewer and KDP-converted e-book downloaded to my Fire HD6, I can't really test that unless I actually publish to KDP and look at the sample. But I need to wait until they respond so I don't complicate their investigation.

You're saying that you have no body font, no p font, etc., set anywhere, is that right? Are there any vestigial font settings left over from whatever it was in, before you converted it?

I can confirm that the latest version of Last Mulligan, uploaded to KDP on February 19, has no font specified in either body or p. There is no body code in CSS at all. I searched all HTML for the word font. There are no matches.

One of the things that we have a lot of experience with--but, I want to be clear, this doesn't make us experts, just frustrated bookmakers--is font-y weirdness at the KDP. I know that, for example, just because you have that chapter-head font embedded, you'll only ever see the body font on the PPW as Helvetica. (One of the reasons I mentioned setting it expressly to a serif font, even if that doesn't affect the bizarro-world hyphenation issue.)

Before your html moves to Sigil, what was it in its earlier life?

All four books were written using MS Word 2007. All were then converted to HTML from Word using Web Page, Filtered.

For my first book, published in 2010, I hand-cleaned the HTML and created the CSS (which was a very laborious process, but a good learning experience!). Some time after that, I discovered word2cleanhtml.com and Sigil, so later books were created using those tools. I've used Kindlegen (command line) from the start. In the past, I submitted the KG-created mobi file to KDP but recently have submitted epub also to see if that fixed the problems, with no difference in results.

Sorry for what must seem like a boatload of random questions--I'm just sort of flailing around, seeking threads to pickup, when I ask these things. Only because of the weirdnesses we've seen, in at least hundreds of books with fonts.

The weird thing is that I've never had these problems until this week's uploads. The HTML/CSS is currently a bit different in each of my four books, and these problems with darker fonts, auto-hyphenation, and smaller chapter graphics are affecting all the recently uploaded books in the same way...and only on the Fire HD6 as far as I know. They were fine before. And the e-books look as they should in the Kindle App for Android on my 10" Acer Iconia A500, which seems to use KF8 since the specified chapter font is displayed. Very odd!

I wish I had other devices to use for testing. I'd love to know if this problem is showing up on any other Fire devices, or just the HD6. Does the Voyage use KF8 or mobi? The downloaded samples look fine on my Kindle Keyboard, which reads mobi (I haven't updated that device's software for a few years).

I'm grateful for your ideas and assistance! I hope KDP can narrow down the problem so I'll know if the issue's on their end or mine.

EDITED TO ADD: The Kindle-specific epub for Last Mulligan does validate at http://validator.idpf.org/. That doesn't necessarily mean that something in there isn't throwing off KDP's conversion, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone wondered.