Quote:
Originally Posted by eggheadbooks1
Exactly. I've been doing the Sigil-convert-to-mobi-in-Kindlegen for my ebooks for the last several years, and this has always created the best results. So I find Amazon's Guideline's strange. And as far as fonts are concerned, the guide mentions Monospace font as a secondary option that does not need to be embedded; why not also mention Unicode? It's a mystery. But then that's Amazon.
Which is why I come here for help, and not KDP's alleged technical help department, which is manned by people for whom English is a foreign language and who often don't understand complex questions. I gave up on them a long time ago. When Amazon/Adobe first developed the InDesign Kindle plugin, there was a feedback button that sent one's email directly to the Kindle programming team; THEN you got proper answers. But now that feedback button links (or is forwarded) to the KDP help department, which as stated is of no help at all.  |
FWIW--and I say this with NO hubris or misplaced pride or anything along those lines--I have found that often, we (my shop) have a better grip on what works, and what doesn't, and where bugs exist, etc., than most of the guys/gals in Seattle. It's not about their programming-fu; it's that they don't run into the issues that we do, because what they work on isn't necessarily based in doing real books. And we (I) do deal with the heads of departments, the hardcore code guys, and the like. For example, we were the ones that told them that the Voyage had a display bug, around images larger than 50% of the screen width and smaller than 100%. Can you imagine? All those resources devoted to creating a new reader, and WE are the ones who find the first large bug? It happens.
Lord knows, I've nearly pulled my hair out on some discussions. I had a lengthy, ongoing discussion with someone there, about the SRL (Start Reading Location). He persistently INSISTED that if we used the HTML "start" anchor, (uh...), that the SRL would work. (We were primarily using the "text" meta...). No matter how many times we demo'ed that that didn't work, he sort of refused to "see" it.
Trust me, I have a litany of those types of discussions. Like everything in coding, you don't find the glitches and bugs, really, until some power-user uses it, and breaks it.
So, I don't hold that against them. The people that you speak to, eggheadbooks1, don't really work in the Tech end. They know the basics, and can usually shepherd a DIYer, but they're not at the upper ends, vis-a-vis something as "sophisticated" as uploading an ePUB instead of a MOBI. Those folks are designed to work with the Word DIYers.
Hitch