[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

I'm sure you don't want to hear this, but wouldn't the obvious and easy solution be to stop embedding / calling for fonts?

I see embedded fonts and images used as sorts all the time on books from mainstream publishers. They rarely or never add anything of value to the book, and often enough they cause problems. (On that Gemini freebie you mentioned, I see that changes in scene are indicated by three bullets in a row, provided by a small rectangular image. Of course the image shows as white on the beige background of my iPhone--which I use for reading before the opera begins, so I want it muted in appearance as well as in sound--which looks odd a bit ugly.)

Personally, as a reader, I appreciate those extra touches in e-books, but I'm sure that many readers don't mind if the formatting is basic. If KDP doesn't come up with anything to resolve the issues I'm having soon, I'll try it!

Does anyone know if the 3 other books, in which the bizarro-world hyphenation was noted:

1. Have ANY type of embedded font, even just for a fleuron, or,
2. Are "calling" one of the device fonts?

Thanks so much, Hitch (and everyone else!) for sticking with me thus far. I know that my attempts to be thorough have had the opposite effect sometimes and made my long posts difficult to understand.

I'm not sure which three e-books you're referring to, but here's what I see on Fire HD6 for several auto-hyphenated e-books I've noticed (I didn't "deconstruct" the actual files, though):

The Gemini Effect (47North, pre-order/Kindle First selection, future publish date April 1, 2015) - appears to have an embedded title/chapter font; there is no Publisher Font option in the menu, so not sure about paragraph font coding (the paragraphs font can be changed, though)

The Tube Riders #1 (originally published 2012, not sure if updated since) - I don't see embedded fonts

The Catalyst (originally published 2012, not sure when updated - KBoards thread re: author receiving a KDP quality notice in early 2013 about "excessive hyphenation"; auto-hyphens are present on Fire HD6) - I don't see embedded fonts in the sample

Diabetics Behaving Badly: Confessions of a Type 2 Insulin Junkie (originally published 2014, not sure if updated since) - I don't see embedded fonts in the sample

[*]While we're at it, Dreamwriter, have you tried uploading the files sans ANY fonts (chapter or otherwise) or font calls at all? Just letting it default to good ol, good ol Caecilia? Has that experiment been attempted?

No, but that is on my list of "things to try." The closest I've come to that is in the current version of Last Mulligan, uploaded to KDP on March 1, which has NO embedded fonts. Here is the relevant KF8 CSS for that book:

body
  {font-family:serif;
  font-weight:normal;}

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%;}

My other three books currently have embedded fonts for chapters/titles and no called fonts specified at all in either body or p (paragraph) CSS. All four e-books have displayed auto-hyphenation on my Fire HD6 in every upload since early/mid-February. Before that time, they didn't.

* * *

My main goal right now is to figure out why the SAME Lotto: Blood Money file uploaded on different dates, 1-30-15 and 3-9-15, looks so different after publication on Fire HD6. The one uploaded on 3-9-15 (right screenshot, below) has auto-hyphenation and the Publisher Font menu option is gone on Fire HD6. Since these two problems are happening with ALL of my e-books in uploads since early/mid-February, I thought the two issues may be related somehow.

The two screenshots below were taken on my Fire HD6 on 3-9-15. The one on the left is the version published on 1-30-15. I took the screenshot on the right after Kindle CS pushed the new (3-9-15) version to my device later that same day. The file uploaded to KDP was the SAME for both versions; the only difference is the date the file was uploaded.

[image links broken]

You can see the differences in those after-publication screenshots: the earlier version has no auto-hyphenation; the later one does. Also, the Publisher Font menu option WAS in the earlier version, but not the later upload. The text is darker in the 3-9-15 published book, too.

Both uploaded files had exactly the same CSS and HTML, with an embedded font for chapters/titles and no font specified for main text (body or paragraphs) in KF8 CSS. The Kindlegen-created mobi looks exactly like the 1-30-15 version when sideloaded to my Fire--NO auto-hyphenation or the other weirdness I've observed on Fire HD6 in all my published e-books uploaded after early/mid-February.