[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ptmkenny

@jhowell Ok, maybe I have misunderstood how publishing on Amazon works now.

Oh, well, you are hardly the first. :-)

Yes, I intend to publish a book (KDP only, no print version).

This book includes some CSS with floats that I am using to make "speech bubbles" with faces next to each line of dialog.

I should be most curious to see this CSS and a batch of the matching HTML, if I may? You're saying that you're putting faces (images), floating to the left/right of text, *inside* a dialogue bubble graphic? Is that right? 3 elements, one a background image?

This CSS works fine on my Paperwhite, Android tablet, and the Windows and Mac Kindle apps, as well as Kindle Previewer. However, on iPhone and iPad, it's messed up. From what I've been able to tell from searching the net, the iOS apps use a different rendering engine than the rest of the Kindle family. Some things work and other things don't, and there's no documentation about what specifically works on iOS (if such docs exist, I would be very grateful to be pointed to them...)

No documentation worth a damn. Lots of speculation. It's all trial-and-error, for those of us that do this regularly.

You're doing this testing with the Preview MOBI? Sorry--I think you're not, right? You're not uploading the MOBI file (or whatever source doc) to the KDP, then downloading the Preview mobi, and testing that, are you? I can't remember what you said, in the initial posts.

And you're sideloading all of these? You're NOT emailing them to your device(s), right? (Emailing to any device will typically get you an unrealistic result).

May I ask, what's happening on all the KF7 devices, with this? I can't envision the original intent working very well, so what's your fallback coding? So that it degrades gracefully?

So, from what I read, I thought that the "right" way to test what an iOS device will see is to create an AFK in Kindle Previewer and then sideload it onto the iOS device. I have also tried emailing the mobi file to myself and delivering it to the iOS device-- this also works, but it delivers a file with different formatting than when I sideload the AFK (this formatting is also messed up, but in a different way).

The "mostly-right" way is to make the AZK, and yes, then manually side-load it, using the USB and iTunes, to the iOS device of choice. Don't bother emailing it to yourself, the result you will see will be misleading at best. Or sideloading the MOBI. Neither will work worth a damn. Only sideloading the AZK works to get you a mostly-realistic view of the end result. (Also--are you testing this on any first-gen iPads? If not, you should find one and you may want to take a Xanax or a drink, before opening the book....)

Yes, the iOS devices use a completely different rendering engine, and all you can do, pretty much, is use media-queries, but even then, you cannot format the entire book to work perfectly on all the devices, if your results are skewing this much, between the KF8s you've tested and the iOS you've tested, unfortunately. There are some things you *can* do--and some you can't. And no way, of course, to segregate the buyers/books. You can't make one file for iOS owners, one for Fire owners, etc. That's what the Media Queries are for--but I'm assuming you know that, based on what you've said so far.

In the market I am working (Japan), there are far more iOS devices than anything else, so it's crucial to get the formatting correct on iOS. That's why I'm doing this.

Well...so? It's certainly that way in the US, but that doesn't affect the overall reality of where people are reading MOBI books. No doubt about it, there must be more iPhones, in the USA, than Kindles. More iPhones and iPads, no doubt about it. But if I were a betting man, I'd say that the vast majority of Kindle books are NOT read on iOS devices. Not all in. Dunno if Kindles are an endangered species, in Japan, but...I don't see the numbers in terms of majority being any different. If you think that everyone reads on iPhones, then perhaps you should be publishing this to iBooks?

I'm trying to envision what you've described (as the book), in the Kindle app on an iPhone...

Hitch