[Hitch]

Hi:

(I'm not going to quote you, as that makes my posts look short, which is a true feat.) As our Resident Curmudgeon says, your client is crazy, but we've made books like this, somewhat. There's errata somewhere in your stylesheet, or in the fonts (surprisingly, the latter is possible). It's true that a single error in a stylesheet will cause ADE to fail, and subsequently, Nook. The fact that the serif is not working in both is a "tell." Ditto on the indentation. Somewhere, somehow, you have an ePUB error, in the CSS.

Now, don't rely, please, on the idea that a conversion from an ePUB to MOBI, successful or otherwise, is any indicator of the "goodness" of the ePUB. Alas, 'tis not so. Mobi will convert a completely crappy ePUB that won't pass validation (and does, too, for the media-queries that are used to create K7 & K8 mobis, in fact).

If your book was failing in ADE but not in Nook, or vice-versa, I'd think that something really odd was amiss; but it's going to be something really, really stupid. I don't mean that YOU are stupid; but it's going to be a) you created a boatload of paragraph styles that weren't really cascading, but stood alone; b) you created a type of inline styles with the serif versus the sans-serif, the italicized versus the non, the indented versus the not, the top-margins, etc., and somewhere in that mess is the error for the paragraph styles.

I don't know--I'm guessing, of course--that you created a base p style, and then built on that. For example, using the base p as indented; then a p class (almost always, always, called no-indent or noindent by everyone here) with a text-indent:0 set...but I am feeling like somewhere you cascaded something over something. If you were working in my shop, I'd be doing two things: first, I'd be looking at your stylesheet myself. Second, I'd run your CSS (I can't recall if you did this or not, sorry!) through validation by itself, not ePUB validaiton, but CSS validation, to see if I got an error. I mean...it's almost inevitable that there is a least two typographical errors--missing ; or a missing hyphen, or a missing colon...something, in both one of the paragraph types and one of the font types (if they are not in the same styling--that's not clear to me). One simple typographic error can invalidate your whole stylesheet, or a given style.

Also, when you created certain paragraph styles (for example, one block style in serif, one in sans-serif), you should have left the character/font styling in the text, i.e., using i or em for italics and not creating spans with those styles...I feel like that is likely kicking you out of whack, as well.

Can you post simply the original CSS (pre auto-converters, please)? That's surely not an IP violation of your client's book, and maybe someone here can spot the glitch. If you do, please explicitly tell us which classes aren't working, too, thanks. Otherwise, we're all doing what I'm doing, which is guessing. A sample of one representative page would help, but I know that can be impossible, so we'll understand if you cannot.

I sympathize, I do, more than you know. I have dozens of books like that...shouldn't have been made, shouldn't have been made as they are; I've gotten far, far better about declining books like that, or endeavoring mightily to re-educate the client pre-production. I know what you're going through.

Hitch