Quote:
Originally Posted by capidamonte
This has been friggin' fascinating. (No irony, really.) I read the whole thread in one go, and my heart hurts for y'all.
I remember the days of trying to figure out all the blind alleys. All the intentional murder of one's fine HTML and CSS. Feeling like we were pieces of human fodder to an uncaring corporate behemoth, largely because we were...
I hope they don't wreck that @import trick. I may go and build a few ePubs out of nostalgia, now. Hope my virtual machines still work. 
Aloha, Hitch! (and all others.) |
Well....
I hope I haven't/don't contribute(d) to them catching on to it in any way, but I fear we may have. There are some other small tricks or...well, tweaks, let's call them, (Twick or Tweak!), that make the files work as they ought.
Quick explanation as to how we ended up where we are:
Spoiler:
However--Cap, you remember back in 2010, when we were added to the Amazon Prof. Converter's List?--well, long story short, we had to jump through hoops, the last 6 months, to be added BACK to it, because some rocket surgeon decided--without mentioning it to those of us on the list--that the list would NOW only be those companies authorized and contracted to do work FOR Amazon, itself.
We found out when someone said I was a "liar," on the KDP forums, and lo...sure 'nuff, we were no longer on the list. October, 2015. I know I was there in August, so...{ughghgh}.
Anyway, I persistently dogged them for a few months, and they said, "well, okay, but you have to pass our criteria," which was a crapload of private information (annual income, employees, etc.) and proprietary info (how we do X, Y and Z, in detail), and we had to pass 3 series of tests, which, without hubris, I tell you that most folks wouldn't couldn't pass.
The last test was converting a moderate number of foreign-language books, VERY densely formatted, PLUS hundreds of images, captions each, from PDF to ePUB/MOBI, in a very limited amount of time. A few days, total--for ALL of them, not each. A speed test, if you will--but ANY error is a fail. (!) Yup, that's what I said--ANY error, of any kind. [We passed.] SO...without further ado, this meant that...
I carefully asked them questions, during this final test, about what they wanted to see, did they want this, or that, yadda, and I casually asked them if they wanted the fonts embedded that were in the PDFs. And,
sure enough, they did. And sure enough, that means
that they've seen what we do, assuming that they were paying attention. If they did, they know about the import bit, and those other things that we hold near and dear.
I am, in fact, sitting here nail-biting, because a very big client of ours (a print layout house) has a customer (for whom we did the white-label eBook work) that is
rabid about their fonts NOT working in their eBooks. I thought "well, crappity, we must not have done X, Y and Z," but when I tested the book, at the KDP, we did do XY&Z, for the fonts remain. But I myself downloaded the free sample for this book--and
the fonts are GONE.
Now, kiddies, listen to your old Mama Hitch when she tells you, that's not what's happened before. Not before today. Until today, I would have said,
100%, if your book displays fonts in the online preview after you've uploaded it, you're home free. Those fonts will survive, into the for-sale book. BUT--with my own eyes and tests, I saw, today, a situation wherein
it MAY NOT be so. Now, I say "may not," because of course, neither we nor the print layout house uploaded the book. The publisher did. I fired off a message at quitting time today, and said "is it possible that
they uploaded the ePUB?" I took a ss of the online Preview, so the client wouldn't think we were shining them on, showing all the fonts, right where they ought to be.
So, here I sit, hoping beyond hope that these folks just screwed up and uploaded the ePUB, not the MOBI. Or did some other hinky thing that bastardized our lovingly-crafted, font-laden book. IF they did NOT...well, then, y'all will be seeing me again, in this thread, to say
"well, GUESS WHAT'S happened NOW?" I already have time committed this weekend, to non-business stuff, but if this is real--if, Odin forbid, they uploaded the MOBI file that we gave them--it's going to be one hell of a long weekend, because we'll be scrambling. Hell, I'd guess we have, I don't know, 70-80 books in, that require embedded fonts?
if I have to pull another long, destroyed weekend trying to figure out new and improved ways around this. I've done that 2x before, and I'm bloody damn tired of it. Not to mention...we do a lot of the aforementioned "tweaking," to make this work. I don't know how many more rabbits we have to pull out of our bums.
Hitch