Quote:
Originally Posted by Barty
I don't know if there's anyone around who's willing/able to modify the font hack, so workaround is all we may have at this point.
In any event, first, you want to confirm that the format is the problem and not something else.
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Understood. I am not doing this with the expectation that someone *must* fix this - I just want to see if we could track down the cause, both because I'm curious/this is intriguing and because who knows, maybe it could, perhaps, who knows, maybe, lead to a fix. And if not, at least we understand what is happening here. That's why I was asking for advice re: a workflow to, as you say, confirm that the format was the problem. ('Does anybody have any idea how to properly confirm suspicions as to what's causing this? My guess is it would involve downloading a given book under different firmwares, observing behavior, and DeDRMing and comparing the results, or something like that...?' 'Wouldn't it be nice if we tried to figure out what's going on?')
Quote:
Originally Posted by shamanNS
@LastSilmaril: Your problems might be some aspect of known and longstanding bugs with fonts cascade / fallbacks configuration and some CSS combinations.
Although it was observed with KF8 books I wouldn't be suprised if same thing applies for KFX books.
Read my comment here.
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It really can't be said that it's the fault of font hack that Kindle and Amazon are doing bunch of "smart" heuristics in attempt to make "converted from a Word document" books display text using Bookerly at all cost... The devices should just correctly interpret CSS code.. since there is no forcing ebook publishers to always use CSS that Amazon deems "the only correct way". |
Thanks for all this shamanNS, this was exactly what I was looking for - a possible explanation of the behavior, and a way to force an untouched, still-DRMed AZW3 onto there. (And, btw, in case it still wasn't clear - my purpose here is not to 'blame' the author of the font hack for Amazon's shenanigans later. It's just to figure out what's going on.)
I'm not sure if this is somehow an instance of the problem you're describing, but it doesn't seem like it. Here's what I've found, with the book I initially was having problems with as a starting point:
- The KFX book delivered directly to the Voyage exhibited this problem - the publisher font, Claris, rendered fine (not as Bookerly), but selecting Bookerly ended up having the text render in Bookerly, not my custom font.
- The AZW3 downloaded from the 'Manage My Content and Devices' page worked fine with the hack.
- Within the main AZW3 CSS file, there is no font-family declaration inside the body tag selector.
- There was one instance, in a secondary and relatively short CSS file, in which a font-family was defined and appeared to have been referring to a file that was not embedded in the AZW3 (and had an invalid-looking path besides):
Code:
@font-face {
font-family: "Fort-Book";
src: url("fonts/Fort-Book.otf");
}
- Within each component xhtml file, however, inline CSS in the body tag specifies font-family thusly:
Code:
<body style="font-family:charis,'times new roman',verdana,arial;">
Based on that experience, I decided to list all the books on my device by extension, and tried opening them all (which really is what I should have done in the first place):
- All 22 of the AZW3s, all of them retail, worked fine with the hack, save one oldish one, a late 2014 copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from Pottermore. Interestingly, that one would *only* get rendered in my custom font, regardless of which font was specified in the Aa menu.
- All 33 of the AZWs - and these, unlike those downloaded by Kindle for PC, appear to all be MOBIs - worked fine with the hack, whether they were converted/emailed docs or retail from Amazon.
- All 53 of the KFXs, regardless of how long they've been on my device, rendered in Bookerly, not my custom font.
So it seems like, unless this never worked with KFX at all, which I doubt -
someone would have said something long ago - Amazon changed how KFX is rendered somehow. What remains unconfirmed is with which firmware this change was introduced, and whether the hack could be modified to work with KFX.
For now, it might be prudent to add a warning to the OP that this doesn't work anymore with KFX on, at least, firmware levels 5.8.8+, and telling people that if they would like the hack to work with most of the newest retail books, they should download them as AZW3 via the 'Manage Your Content and Devices' interface. (I guess they could also download them via Kindle for PC 1.17 and DeDRM but somehow I don't think you want this to be 'official' advice.)