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Originally Posted by JSWolf
What I've seen in ePub that's a carryover from Kindle eBooks are things that are easy to fix or not do in the first place. For example, images when an embedded font will do, an offset left margin and no offset right margin, fake blockquotes, and 1.2em line-height. all of those are easy to do in an ePub. It's not going to take a long time to do these things correctly.
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Yes, but you're making
QUANTUM assumptions there, boyo. In KF7, all
those things are CORRECT to do. There are no blockquotes with offset right margins, for one thing, in KF7. That's why you see fake blockquotes, offset left margin with no matching right margin (I probably personally have...s**t, I dunno, 150 books out there with that it in, and company-wide, probably 1500.) The 1.2 line height is the standard mobi height (for either KF8 or KF7), and actually,
Amazon does not want that changed. You have to tread rather carefully when you DO change it, to ensure that you don't screw the pooch on the K4iOS app, brah.
As far as the embedded font/image, you don't know whether or not the maker had the chutzpah to use an embedded font, or even if that option was available when the book was made! And moreover, there are very few firms that can make embedded fonts work at Amazon. If they made their book with Word --yeah, yeah, save me the spiel, we all know it's a cardinal sin--they certainly couldn't have done an embedded font.
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What is it you do when you need to do something that KF8 can do but you cannot do the same in Mobi?
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That one's easy. We make a new ePUB, and then modify it for mobi, prior to building the mobi therefrom. Hell, we do that on a good 95% of books, snookums.
This is the thing that far too many experts on these forums constantly forget--that for the average bookmaker, we don't have the luxury of ignoring KF7, as I see done here all the time. For example, Ruben posts CSS and HTML that's inspired--if you only have a Fire, PPW, etc.--a KF8 device. He does't deal with fallback coding via media queries. Those of us in the trenches do. I'm not saying that makes us better, or superior, or any crap like that, but please remember, there are still millions, or at least, hundreds of thousands of KF7 devices out there, and
somebody has to make books that those folks can read. If you, Jon, were one of those folks--ye Gods, I can just imagine it!!!--you'd be RANTING about lack of KF7 support from all those blithe spirits that only make books that "look good" on KF8. Us? We make 'em look as good as we can on KF7, and their big brethren, the KF8s.
It's a LOT MORE work, but I admire Amazon's determination not to Apple their clientele and dump support for the older devices. The least I can make sure that we do is to
walk the walk, since I've
talked the talk.
Hitch