Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide

[kindleformatting]

@charlie - If you e-mail me copy of your purchase receipt I will send you the non-DRMed book in either Mobi or ePub (joshua@kindleformatting.com). It is available in non-DRM from the Amazon Kindle store, but there is no way to sell it that way on the eBookBase.

The encoding you want to use is UTF-8. Here is the meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

The sample book, The Four Million, on my website has a default stylesheet that usually works pretty well. The Kindle's own default formatting keeps most books looking fine without one, but I like setting up some of my own defaults like centered headings.

I have seriously considered writing a book about ePub conversions and formatting, and would be convinced about pursuing the project if enough people were interested in it.

@MejDam - I get 35%, so about $3.50 from each sale. Before Amazon recently stopped offering automatic discounts I was getting twice that much based on my list price of $19.95.

[susan_cassidy]

Kindle supports Latin-1 (Windows 1252) and UTF-8 in Mobipocket files.

[crutledge]

I guess I goofed on the first try. After putting in Joshua's font line everything is fine and all symbols appear in the MP Reader except for the Return Symbol which displays as a blank square. I guess that it is left out by Mobipocket.

Thanks,
Charlie

[kindleformatting]

Charlie,

You'll need to use UTF-8 for those characters. Use this meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

As far as I know, there is not a specific recommendation for Kindle/Mobi, but I always recommend using UTF-8. Makes my life easier.

- Joshua

[crutledge]

Outstanding!
I have used UTF-8 and it works fine in MOBI. However, since I also produce EPUB, LRF, and IMP books where UTF-8 doesn't seem to work so well, I need to do more research.

Many thanks for stimulating so much excitement.
Charlie

[PaulChernoch]

Joshua,

I read your book and it was excellent. Now I am trying to apply the lessons I learned. One problem I am having is with tables. I got the background color setting to work as you suggested using "background-color:#RRGGBB". And happily the combination of "padding: 0" on my <td> elements and "border-spacing: 0" on my <table> elements plus 'cellpadding="0"' for good measure removed all the space between my cells as I wanted. (Maybe overkill, but I was experimenting with Calibri versus mobigen to see which produced the best results.) But I am interested in what other table related CSS features or HTML element attributes are supported for the table, th, and td elements. This information is not covered in Appendix A. I tried "vertical-align: middle" in my stylesheet, but it had no effect. I hate to insert br tags to fudge this.

BTW, the reason for my fascination with tables is to support scrolling over images that are too large to be displayed in readable form, such as maps. I have written a Perl script using Image::Magick that slices an image into a grid of Kindle-friendly pieces and saves them as individual jpegs, as well as stitching them back together again with an HTML table. By making the images small enough (as you described) they are not zoomed, and the table support on the Kindle 2 allows you to scroll left and right by a half a screen nicely using the 5-way, while Next Page and Prev Page allow up and down movement.

- Paul

[kindleformatting]

Paul,

You present an interesting question. I have not done massively extensive testing with tables because the testing I did showed me that support is minimal at best. CSS is not going to get you nearly as far as just using HTML 3 attributes and values. You'll have to stick to the basics and be happy with getting anything usable at all.

Sorry I can't be more help...

Joshua

[GRiker]

Kindle tables support the <th scope="col|row"> tag for headers. They will be rendered bold, which is usually what you want. Also, they don't have to be the first row in the table, so you can have a title row above the header.

Kindle tables will also render borders using the 'border="1'' attribute in the <table> tag.

G

[PaulChernoch]

Originally Posted by GRiker

Kindle tables support the <th scope="col|row"> tag for headers. They will be rendered bold, which is usually what you want. Also, they don't have to be the first row in the table, so you can have a title row above the header.

Kindle tables will also render borders using the 'border="1'' attribute in the <table> tag.

G

Thanks for the tip!

- Paul

[PiVi1962]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I have personally always found that the obvious method of <div width="x"> or <p width="x"> works very satisfactorily for indenting poetry. Do you have better method for doing it?

I have not yet found any place that explains how to left- and right-indent sentences on .MOBI format (and hence in Kindle).

I have found this solution (for the HTML original):

<table width=100%><tr>
<td width=1%></td><td width=1%></td>
<td width=96%>Cras mattis eleifend neque, in tempus ligula facilisis ut. Morbi commodo condimentum enim sit amet dapibus.</td>
<td width=1%></td><td width=1%></td></tr>
</table>

I use the <table> tag, and I insert a few empty left- and or right-colums.
For some obscure reason, width=2% cannot be obtained directly, by only through the sum of two 1% empty colums.
Adding a different number of empty colums at width=1% allows to build "sinuous" poetry, as in Chapter three of "Alice in wonderland".

Beware: long sentences can be cut in the screen of Kindle and not shown at all, so this formatting is useful for poetry, but not for long quotations (in the previous release 2.2 of the Operating System of Kindle, the solution worked correctly, but now under 2.3 no more).
To avoid losing text, even in poetry every line has to be inserted in a different table.