@tex2002ans: Yep to all above... though zerbra striped tables are kind of "okay" IMO. Not one of those pineapple on pizza things for me. I used alternating classes for the <tr>s rather than even CONSIDERING doing it the fancy automatic CSS pseudo-selector way, which I imagined would be far to exotic for Kindle pipeline.
Bottom line is that it's all workled out nicely. I found an alternate glyph that renderd properly, it was some out-there wierd one. Life's too short for that, the alternative is just fine so it's all lovely TEXT in the tables and looks just peachy now.
The client WAS urging me to just take a short cut and sample the tables as images but I stood my ground on that as there are external hyperlinks in there which would... well, I'll leave you to imagine the uproar from the consumers and maybe even Amazon QA.
Thanks for the links: I'll look at those over a BIG coffee when I get a quiet moment... "quiet" ha! A client just droped 100 titles on me. Mustn't grumble though, they're for a really cool kids TV series.
Oh, and thanks to all the other contributors in this thread. I only really come onto here when I'm stuck with something, you guys always come up with the goods.
Eyebrows still firmly raised on discovering that the image conversion inherits the background colour rather than just going to white.