[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DLSieving

The MOBI generated by the desktop Kindle Previewer didn't used to show the embedded fonts. Turns out they had not been embedded. Now they are, and now it does. This round's SendToKindle results TBD. KDP online version of Kindle Previewer showed me a blank screen and I didn't spend any more time with it.

Sorry--something is quite amiss here. The desktop KP has shown fonts for as long as font embedding has been introduced. At least 3 years. Not a day less. It may even be 4-5 years; I'll have to go back and look, but it's not less than 3 years. Not months.

KDP may still be stripping my fonts but the results described above open the possibility that the real reason was that I had just not properly embedded them in the first place. It's true that I hadn't embedded them, but that may just have been masking the fact that they would have been stripped anyway; TBD.

As I don't know anything at all about Calibre, I can't speak to this. MOST Word file conversion mechanisms do NOT embed fonts. This is generally because the Word file does not have the font embedded. Even if you embed the font in the Word file, it would not survive being uploaded to, say, the KDP. The font would be stripped.

GENERALLY, font embedding requires an explicit overt act, putting the font family into the ePUB, and calling it as required in the CSS/HTML.

In either case, my next argument to KDP will be simpler if my locally-generated MOBI looks right, which it now does.

Well, good luck with that.

Calibre expects to find fonts for embedding in ~/Library/Fonts.

To do what? To embed them? Or to display them? Have you tested the MOBI by displaying it somewhere that doesn't have access to your Font Libary (or folder, or whatever you're doing). Isn't the Calibre Library the result of a book being added, or, presumably, the addition of a converted file? Are you sure that the Calibre Library would also be the repository for fonts to be embedded into eBooks that you create? Is that what Kovid and those guys say?

This I have discovered as noted above.

• Is there a way to preview on KDP without using their online Kindle Previewer, e.g. by "publishing" the book for author viewing only before really publishing it?
• Will I be able to simulate publication before actually publishing?

Client? A client author? Yes. You give them the final mobi. If the MOBI file that goes on sale at Amazon is decidedly or even somewhat different than the MOBI file on your computer, you've done something wrong. If naught else, you would simply download the Step7 Preview MOBI from the KDP, and send that to your client. That's the file that will show you, more than anything else, what the for-sale book will look like.

My technical progress may seem to be slow but it's not, it's just intermittent, as I've been spending the last few weeks proofreading. One way or another, one publishing platform or another, that has to get done. Almost there.

Well...your speed is your own concern. I don't think anyone here would really give it a second thought.

Hitch