Quote:
Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1
Today I was going through the Kindle Publishing Guidelines again and Amazon write: "Do NOT use Unicode format characters, as they may cause problems."
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That part is ABYSMALLY written. It was talking about different Unicode SPACES besides Non-Breaking Space + Zero-Width Non-Joiner:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by AmazonPublishingGuidelines2016.1
The only supported spaces are the normal space, the non-breaking space ( ), and the zero-width non-joiner (‌). Use of any other space can break the selection, dictionary lookup, and line-wrap algorithms.
Do NOT use Unicode format characters, as they may cause problems.
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There are a ton of different spaces in Unicode:
U+0020 SPACE
U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE
U+1680 OGHAM SPACE MARK
U+180E MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR
U+2000 EN QUAD
U+2001 EM QUAD
U+2002 EN SPACE
U+2003 EM SPACE
U+2004 THREE-PER-EM SPACE
U+2005 FOUR-PER-EM SPACE
U+2006 SIX-PER-EM SPACE
U+2007 FIGURE SPACE
U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE
U+2009 THIN SPACE
U+200A HAIR SPACE
U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE
U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
U+205F MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE
U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE
Just stick with the two mentioned above (Non-Breaking Space + Zero-Width Non-Joiner) and you will be fine.
Side Note: Besides those two, the only other space that is commonly used would be the Thin Space, and that is used in languages like French (around punctuation marks like guillemets « » + colons, etc. etc.). To be more compatible, you
can swap Thin Spaces <-> Non-Breaking Spaces (not as typographically pleasing though)... although I don't believe I have seen any problems with thin spaces on Kindles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1
This, even though they also write: "The source of a Kindle book can be encoded in many different ways. All encodings are supported, provided that: The encoding of the HTML files is clearly stated in the HTML [and ] The computer used for compiling the sources supports the encoding and knows how to convert it to Unicode."
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Again, seems to me like this is some horrid writing.
From what I could tell by looking at previous guidelines (2014.3), there used to be two separate subsections:
- Other Encoding Are Supported
- Talked about using UTF-8 OR other encodings (why you would use non-UTF-8 in this day and age, I have no clue).
- Spaces and Unicode Characters
- This just discussed the + ‌ + gave the same warning about Unicode characters.
Somewhere along the line, they merged both and added in the line: "XML entities are strictly required for "<" (<), ">" (>), and "&" (&).".
Their previous version seemed to make a lot more sense in my mind. Merging them together just created some needless confusion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1
So if the encoding is Unicode, and when tested the Kindle devices and apps display Unicode characters, why would Amazon "forbid" Unicode characters?
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Just use the Unicode characters, and avoid using all those rarer spaces. Problem solved. :P