Notjohn, would you (or anyone else) please check the downloadable sample for
Last Mulligan on your Fire and tell me if you see the auto-hyphenation? You may need to increase the font size for it to become obvious. It would also help to know which size Fire you have, whether it's an HD or HDX, and the current software version on the device (a new version is currently being pushed to some Fires). Tell me what time you viewed the sample, too, since I'll be uploading new files today. I need to determine if this is happening only on my Fire HD6 or on other Fire devices as well.
I heard back from Amazon KDP yesterday. Here is the meat of their reply:
Quote:
Thank you for your reply. I hope you are having a great day. I'm really sorry to hear that you've been having problems with the conversion of your files on KDP.
I've checked your files and found that you have uploaded into KDP both e-Pub format and .Mobi; these two formats are final format conversions, and it's possible that the auto-hyphenation problem is being caused due to the original format used for your documents.
If your source file is Word we recommend that you check the line spacing, as it won't be considered when uploading the file, it's possible that this might be affecting and automatically including the hyphens, if your book was created using HTML, we recommend that you verify the tags and that there are no extra tags that could cause this.
I understand that you also found that there some other issues such as bolder chapter, darker body font or chapter graphics; and that you also found that the problems are not present in the KDP previewer. I've opened your files with our previewer and found that the issues are present in the previewer, so it seems that the source of the problem is the original format of your books.
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Based on that feedback, I searched for anything to do with line spacing in the CSS and HTML. I did find this in CSS span code for the
initial chapter paragraph font (which is larger than the paragraph text):
line-height:0; This code was probably a vestige from years-ago experiments with drop caps. Since it is unnecessary anyway, I deleted that line and re-uploaded to KDP. Note that there's never been line height specification in any paragraph code.
Late in the five-hour KDP "full publishing" process, the "Send sample now" section of the e-book's product page went missing. It didn't come back for about 10 hours!
During that time, I was unable to check the sample to see if deletion of that line fixed the problem. When I was finally able to download the sample to my Fire HD6 this morning, it turns out that my change had NO effect at all.
So, I decided to go back to square one and re-uploaded the Kindlegen-created mobi originally sent to KDP on October 23, 2014, when
Last Mulligan was published. I'm quite certain that the auto-hyphenation was not present on my Fire HD6 for that version, although after trying to fix things for over a week now, I'm beginning to wonder if I just didn't notice it.
My other recently updated books also have the same problems, though, and I didn't notice auto-hyphens in earlier versions of those either.
It's been less than an hour since I uploaded that original file, so I'm still waiting for a new sample to become available. If it turns out that the original version just re-uploaded IS free of auto-hyphens on the Fire HD6, then I'll know for certain that my recent efforts introduced the problems. Then I can
slowly re-introduce code and back matter I was trying to change and (hopefully) determine what triggered it.
I don't understand why the auto-hyphenation shows up on the Fire HD6, while it's
not present in KDP's online previewer or in my KF8-reading Android Kindle app on my other tablet.
And there are no auto-hyphens in the file I download directly from KDP after their initial conversion process (the "Book Preview File") and sideload onto the HD6.
I'll keep you posted...