[Hitch]

Originally Posted by V_Shaft

I've registered to the forum specifically to post a question regarding font embedding and the KDP conversion from the Pits of Hell.

I've done an epub e-book with 2 embedded fonts in Sigil. These are Anonymous Pro (Regular, Italic & Bold) & Open Sans (Regular, Italic & Bold). Both are well known and widely used ttf fonts.

Now, in the epub, they work perfectly. When uploading my book to KDP... not so much. Just to be clear, this isn't the first e-book I've done and I've made sure - just like every time - that both the epub and the stylesheet itself are validated and contain no errors.

I converted the epub via KindleGen (KG), the latest version. The resulting mobi contains no errors, also. And right enough, after testing with Kindle Previewer (KP) and Kindle for PC (KPC) I was assured the custom fonts work in the converted mobi file.

I then set out to upload that same mobi file to the KDP service. The file uploads, then KDP starts "converting it to Kindle format". When that was over, I downloaded the preview file (the "Download Book Preview File" option) and I get a mobi file that has stripped fonts.

I should clarify what I mean by "stripped":

After I browse the inside contents of the KDP-served mobi file/archive, I found that the font files themselves are left intact, inside the Fonts folder.

Upon examining the stylesheet I found it has been butchered.

The @font-face declarations at the top of the stylesheet (before body and everything else) have also been left intact. They look like this:

@font-face {
    font-family: "OpenSans-Regular";
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
    src: url(../Fonts/OpenSans-Regular.ttf) format("truetype");
}

But every subsequent font-family rule in the CSS has been removed! The one in my <p>, <h1>, <h2> and other custom classes... gone. For example, my original class

.blok {
	font-family: "Anonymous_Pro_B", sans-serif;
	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 2em;
	text-align: center;
}

now looks like this

.blok {

	font-weight: bold;
	font-size: 2em;
	text-align: center;
}

I've tried just about every remedy offered in this thread, but not one seems to work.

So I would like to ask Hitch or someone of the experts to please answer just what the hell is KDP doing? Just what makes KG, KP and KPC leave and display the fonts, and KDP strip them? I'm at my breaking point regarding this issue. Can I even embed the fonts, or is it a fruitless effort doomed from the start?

Hi, Teo:

I saw your post on the KDP forums--good luck with that. I'll be seriously surprised if anyone there can tell you the answer, or even knows the real question.

The long and short of it is that starting in April, above and beyond all the other issues you've seen described in this thread, Amazon did an update to the KDP that has resulted in all fonts being stripped from uploaded ePUBS, uploaded MOBIs, uploaded you-name-it.

What you are seeing isn't unusual. The fonts are being stripped, and in some cases, as you've described, the actual stylesheet is being altered. It's...boggling.

I know this because we had a bunch of books in, that were due out, for an international best-selling author, the week of April 5th, and suddenly, all the fonts started to disappear. My inference from correspondence with Amazon is that they are not sure what they did that caused it, because someone from ECR emailed me, asking about our workaround. I simply told them that we'd arrived at one, which resulted in another email asking for a phone conference about it, which hasn't yet occurred.

I hate to be the bearer, but that's the bottom line.

Hitch