How do fixed forced alignment in a Kindle book

[Kratos]

Hi.

I have updated a book of mine that is available on the Kindle store. I have received a quality control message from Kindle that says

"The body text in your book has forced alignment. It's important that your book file does not force alignment for body text."

I'm not sure what they are referring to exactly and their help page is lacking. Could it be page breaks?

The original version epub was converted with Kindlegen. I converted the second edition epub with Calibre. Does this have any bearing?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Kratos

I'm not sure what they are referring to exactly and their help page is lacking. Could it be page breaks?

It is talking about the CSS attribute "text-align". This makes the text left/center/right/justified.

Amazon wants this to be controllable by the user's preferences, so when the book forces the entire text into a certain justification, it degrades the user experience.

You will have to open up the EPUB in an editor (many of us use Sigil), open the .css file, and search for "text-align".

Here is an example:

p {
	margin-top: 0;
	margin-bottom: 0;
	line-height: 1.2em;
	text-align: justify;
	text-indent: 2em;
}

You can then remove the entire text-align attribute (marked in red).

Instead of the device now making every paragraph justified, it will default to whatever justification the device/user preferences say.

Originally Posted by Kratos

The original version epub was converted with Kindlegen. I converted the second edition epub with Calibre. Does this have any bearing?

Kindlegen is the only software officially supported by Amazon, and if you are converting to MOBI using Calibre, that will most likely introduce trouble.

If you already have the original EPUB, there is no reason you should NOT be using Kindlegen to generate files for Amazon.

[Kratos]

Hi Tex2002ans. Thank you so much for you in-depth and solid answer. I will implement it this weekend and let you know.

The reason I use Calibre and not Kindlegen is because it easily converts the table of contents of my ePub. Using Kindlegen it doesn't and I find it so frustrating and difficult to add the ToC in that I give up. I don't understand why Amazon don't add such a feature to Kindlegen as not all writers find this easy!

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Kratos

The reason I use Calibre and not Kindlegen is because it easily converts the table of contents of my ePub. Using Kindlegen it doesn't and I find it so frustrating and difficult to add the ToC in that I give up. I don't understand why Amazon don't add such a feature to Kindlegen as not all writers find this easy!

You can automatically generate an inline TOC with Sigil. Authoring an ebook with Sigil also has the advantage that you can use both the built-in FlightCrew error check and EpubCheck to make sure that there are no issues with your book.

(KindleGen can compile ePubs, too.)

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Kratos

The reason I use Calibre and not Kindlegen is because it easily converts the table of contents of my ePub. Using Kindlegen it doesn't and I find it so frustrating and difficult to add the ToC in that I give up.

It could be a problem with the way you have the TOC placed in the EPUB, or the way your toc.ncx is generated.

Do you have an inline TOC in your book? Perhaps you forgot to set it in the content.opf.

Here is the guide section out of a typical book that I generated in Sigil:

  <guide>
    <reference href="Text/cover.xhtml" title="Cover" type="cover" />
    <reference href="Text/TOC.xhtml" title="Table Of Contents" type="toc" />
  </guide>

Can only make educated guesses as to what the problem is without taking a look at the file directly, or knowing more information on what programs you are actually using to create the EPUB.

If you do open your EPUB in Sigil though, you can right click on your TOC in the Book Browser, Add Semantics -> Table of Contents. This will add that section above to the content.opf automatically.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

You can automatically generate an inline TOC with Sigil.

Although depending on the way the book is structured, its auto generation of the inline TOC might not work too well. Plus from what I understand, Kratos already has everything completed in this second edition of the book, just wanted to make a few changes and now Amazon is complaining (probably just enforcing their rules more strictly than when the book was first submitted).

All that aside though, Sigil is a great EPUB making program. Plus it makes it very easy and takes care of a lot of these annoyances.

As a side note, perhaps you should try to use the latest version of Kindle Previewer (a GUI frontend for Kindlegen, you can just drag and drop the EPUB onto Kindle Previewer and it will convert for you). Perhaps the latest version might handle your book better since last you tried it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...cId=1000765261