Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I downloaded your EPUB and was able to confirm that sending it to a Kindle device as a personal document using send-to-kindle results in significantly different rendering when compared with sideloading a Master MOBI file produced from it using the Kindle Previewer.
I copied the AZW3/KF8 send-to-kindle file from my Kindle and compared it to the Master MOBI and the original EPUB using calibre's editor. The CSS in the Master MOBI file produced using the Kindle Previewer is almost identical to the original EPUB. However there are several changes to the CSS in the send-to-kindle file. Most of the call outs to the embedded fonts have been stripped.
Amazon does not adhere to industry standards. They only provide vague "guidelines" on how source files should be formatted for Kindle e-books.
Amazon's publishing process is picky about what it allows for embedded publisher fonts. And unfortunately the rules are undocumented. Experienced book formatters have learned what to use and what to avoid by trial and error. The best advice I have seen is to keep things as simple as possible.
The current version of the Kindle Previewer performs only a subset of the processing that is done when a book is published on Amazon. And it used to be that personal documents converted by Amazon using send-to-kindle were also minimally processed.
That changed recently. It appears that with the introduction of the Kindle Scribe Amazon has revamped the send-to-kindle pipeline to be much closer to what published books go through. That allows the Scribe to use Amazon's newer KFX format for personal documents. (It is necessary because the Scribe's annotation features all rely on KFX.) Unfortunately for you it means that more restrictions now apply.
|
Amen, brother, amen.
I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. As I said above, upthread, we've been doing this 13 years and I have yet to see 25 fonts pass unmolested, pretty much. Now, granted, a) KDP has gotten significantly better, and b) given the problems we've seen, we no longer even try to do that many, in recent years, but still...I've seen this backfire more times than I'd like to say.
Fonts stripped completely; fonts substituted; we know for a fact that for years, there was an actual limit on calls to Arial, that you could use. No matter what you did--had it as a p style, or called it some other way, when you reached the limit, it would stop appearing.
Just...perhaps it's all solved, and now everything works as it "ought," but it didn't for at least a decade.
Hitch