Quote:
Originally Posted by malligator
Why must one wonder? One can wonder if they choose to, but there is absolutely no requirement that one must wonder about the underlying format of Kindle books. I have absolutely no idea what the format of my Kindle books are and I don't feel your (perceived) loss of control.
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I think most of the people who are concerned about this are using calibre to do various things, and this gets in the way. I only use calibre to manage and convert ePub files so I do not know all of the use cases that are affected when calibre is not able to understand 'kfx' files. I expect the situation is similar with Fire tablets, though there is no 'kfx' (or even prc) file there at all.
It appears that hyphenation is contingent on having soft hyphens inserted in the source before it is compiled to mobi. So you have been able to do that with calibre (using Hyphenate This! plugin) for awhile now, but Amazon has to go back and recompile existing content to do this (and maybe they can only do this if they have source files to work with). Likewise this is how they are 'normalizing' drop caps.
But kerning and ligatures should be rules that are declared in the font files themselves. My Paperwhite 1 doesn't do either, or maybe the font files on there have had these rules removed (noting that arabic and indic scripts require ligatures and these appear to render correctly). Meanwhile, the iPad app shows ligatures and kerning with all content, regardless of source. But on my Fire, I'm not seeing kerning or ligatures except with 'enhanced typography' content. So that's odd.