Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
The problem is that the unencrypted KFX is an inferior archival format and a sub-optimal source for format shifting (because of the device-specific pre-rendered content).
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I agree that KFX is inferior to KF8 as a source for conversion and archival, but I would say that it is compiled rather than pre-rendered. As far as I can tell the instructions in KFX for rendering a particular book are common across all platforms.
The process of conversion to KFX applies a bunch of heuristics intended to improve the look of the formatting, for example by tightening up excessive white space. It messes with units, so that a book originally coded with a particular property size expressed in pixels may have it changed to percent or ems in the interest of consistent rendering across devices. CSS is flattened into a simplified set of display rendering properties. Distinctions between HTML elements such as <p> and <div> or <span> and <b> are lost during conversion and are retained only in as much as they impact the resulting display properties of the element.
There are three different ways that images can be delivered based on the platform used to read the book: SD color, HD color, and grayscale. So the image content of a book converted from KFX will depend on the type of device that the book was sent to. Kindle for PC would be superior to an e-ink device as a source for conversion. (Images in KF8 format are sometimes split out into a separate azw6 file that varies across devices in much the same way.)