[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yowza, now they're giving dates? Hell, I'll give up my life with ECR and start emailing plain old Tech support (smile).

Yes, a date! I've been going round and round with them via email about this for a week, and I've never been given a date before. Which makes me think they will be examining the matter more thoroughly now...I hope. Perhaps they've been receiving complaints from other KDP authors in recent days?

The darker-font thing is just freaking weird.

Yes, it is!

I admit, I didn't fine-toothed comb it, but no...I don't see anything that leaps out at me, other than you've swapped out for Helvetica. Did you always have Helvetica as your primary body font? (Also, FYI, this sample that I'm looking at still has that header font we discussed? Is it supposed to? I mean, is the sample supposed to have an embedded font, or...?)

The body font is serif. The reader can still select their preferred font for main text on the device. Helvetica is specified only for Chapters and Headings.

The sample you have is probably from several days ago. The current version is showing the updated fonts in the downloaded sample. There are no embedded fonts now, and no Fonts folder in the epub.

Well, you shouldn't really have that if you don't have the bold-italic face itself. I don't think that should affect the remainder of your font, but as I've said boringly often, the very existence of an embedded font in a mobi can cause some serious wonky.

Thanks for looking over my CSS! I'm self-taught, so it helps to have another set of eyes take a look. I've worked on this for quite a while now without results, and I'm getting tired of dealing with it. Since I don't know whether the problem truly originates in my file or at KDP, some days (and nights) I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels. You know?

I'll think about the bold-italic thing. The HTML's always been that way in the past, but maybe KDP processes that tag differently now. Who knows?

Edited to Add: Upon further reflection, I don't think that bold-italic <span> has anything to do with the problems. There are no similar tags in any of my other books, and they're displaying the same auto-hyphenation and darker fonts.

Yes, but it's also true that readers are well accustomed to the rivers of white/short lines, from the earliest K days through the halcyon K2 days, etc. I think it's essentially unnoticeable now, on a DEVICE. I recently was reading a someting-for-Dummies book and was completely put off by the fact that they'd obviously used align:left, and it screwed with my reading a bit. I doubt it would affect anyone else, but it did me.

I don't mind the occasional unjustified line since I'm used to seeing that on my Kindle Keyboard, but it's surprising just how many ragged-right lines there are on the first page of this book on the Fire HD6 when auto-hyphens are turned off via CSS (see Example #3 in my OP). It really doesn't justify neatly without auto-hyphens on the first two pages, especially when the font's larger. I think the effect is exaggerated because of the small screen size. But the way the software handles auto-hyphenation looks icky, too.

As stated, I've ordered the sample to my Voyage, and I'll let you know.

UPDATE: no optional/soft hyphens whatsoever on the Voyage.

Well, that's good!

Here's a question:

Are the SAMPLE and the bought-book the same?

Hitch

I haven't purchased the Last Mulligan e-book, and I don't want to until this is fixed because I'd have to ask customer service at Amazon Kindle to push the new version to my account every time I change it in order to re-check the formatting. Samples of that e-book on my Fire HD6 were fine in the past; since updating the book over the last week or so, they're not.

I did, however, purchase my other three e-books years ago. A week or so ago, after I discovered these issues, I had CS push the latest versions of those e-books to my Fire HD6. All have the same problems in both bought-books and samples (remember, I also updated those three books within the last few weeks). They were also fine before.