Quote:
Originally Posted by dgatwood
My only question is whether they're doing something special in the Fire HD6's firmware, like enabling automatic hyphenation unless it is explicitly disabled.
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That's what I thought initially, but I haven't been able to find
any other KDP books published within the last week that display auto-hyphenation on my Kindle Fire HD6! My device's software updated from 4.5.2 to 4.5.3 a few days ago, and it's still there.
Quote:
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The reason I'm curious is that I know for a fact that Kindle for OS X crashes if you enable automatic hyphenation in a KF8 book. It not only won't let you open the book, but also won't let you delete the book without an instant crash. So if KDP is adding it on ingest, then every book they import from now on is going to cause their buggy Mac reader to turn into an almost literal Kindle fire....
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Are you able to open the
Last Mulligan sample in the Mac Kindle app? If so, do you see auto-hyphenation there? (You may need to increase font size.)
* * *
Amazon KDP's Technical Team is investigating and said I'll hear from them by Thursday, March 5 (one week from today).
I'm focusing my attention on
Last Mulligan for now, but all four of my recently updated e-books have auto-hyphenation and body text/headings that are darker than in previous editions. I even re-uploaded the original (October 2014) Kindlegen-created mobi file. That version was fine before but now has the same issues.
As far as I know, these oddities show up only on the Fire HD6.
But when I download the KDP-converted file directly from KDP and sideload on my Fire, everything looks fine (no extra hyphens or too-dark text). It's so weird!
Here is the KF8 stylesheet (CSS) for
LM as it is now. Within the last week or two, I've tried many other things, but those changes didn't seem to make any difference either. I'm open to suggestions! I didn't include some parts of that CSS below because (1) this post is already so long and (2) there's nothing suspect in that code (such as bold or font specifications not seen in other parts).
Quote:
body
{font-family:serif;
font-weight:normal;}
div.fullimage
{padding:0;
margin:0;
text-align:center;
vertical-align:middle;
text-indent:0;}
img.fullimage
{padding:0;
margin:0;
text-indent:0;
height:100%;
vertical-align:middle;
text-align:center;}
div.copycenter
{margin:0;
text-indent:0;
text-align:center;}
div.title
{margin:0;
text-indent:0;
text-align:center;
font-family:"Helvetica", sans-serif;
font-size:1.5em;}
div.chapter
{margin-top:1em;
margin-bottom:0;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
padding-bottom:.3em;
text-align:center;
text-indent:0;
font-family:"Helvetica", sans-serif;
font-size:1.5em;}
p
{margin:0;
text-indent:5%;}
p.center
{margin-top:0;
margin-bottom:1em;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
text-align:center;}
p.firstpara
{margin-top:1em;
margin-bottom:0;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
text-indent:0;}
p.scenebreak
{margin-top:.5em;
margin-bottom:0;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
text-indent:0;}
p.toc
{margin:0;
text-align:center;
text-indent:0;}
p.image
{margin:0;
text-align:center;
text-indent:0;}
div.dots
{margin-top:.5em;
margin-bottom:0;
margin-left:0;
margin-right:0;
color:#909090;
text-indent:0;
text-align:center;}
span.initialcap
{font-size:1.5em;}
span.bold
{font-weight:bold;}
span.italic
{font-style:italic;}
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Is it wrong to have
<span class="bold italic">......</span> in the HTML to call both bold and italic CSS? The epub has
always been this way, without any issues, but I thought I'd ask since I'm looking at everything.
And here is what's at the top of each HTML section. Nothing has changed in that part of my epubs since these e-books were originally published. My files validate at IDPF as EPUB 2.0.
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
I do know how to disable auto-hyphenation completely by adding
hyphens:none; in the body code, so that's an option. That results in
a lot more ragged-right lines, though, even with full justification. I'm not sure which option most readers would prefer: extra hyphens or more ragged-right lines.
Personally, I wouldn't mind auto-hyphenation if the software didn't hyphenate after two letters or hyphenate proper names and already-hyphenated words. It does seem to break the words properly otherwise (between syllables) in my books.
I would appreciate knowing if anyone notices something in the above code that could be causing:
- auto-hyphenation (only on the Fire HD6, as far as I know)
- darker-than-normal text for page headings, chapter headings, and body text
Also, does anyone see auto-hyphenation in the
Last Mulligan sample on their Kindle Paperwhite, Voyage, or other KF8 ereader? That may be important to know. You may need to increase font size in order to see. On my Fire HD6, it's most evident using Bookerly font, but the hyphens are there with other device fonts, too.
Thanks so much for your interest and assistance thus far! I'll let you know if I make any progress.