Enhanced Typesetting - Publisher or Amazon?

[odamizu]

I just stumbled on a recent Kindle book (2018) from a major publisher (Penguin Random House) that doesn't have Enhanced Typesetting and Page Flip enabled. It appears to be KF8. All other books by this author have Enhanced Typesetting and Page Flip enabled.

When I queried Amazon, they said they would contact the publisher and ask them to update the book with Enhanced Typesetting.

I was startled, because my very vague and likely incomplete understanding is that Enhanced Typesetting is added by Amazon, not the publisher.

I am quite curious, and if anyone has the time to provide a simple explanation how a Kindle ebook ends up with Enhanced Typesetting, I would be most interested. Thanks!

[jhowell]

Amazon provides software, called Kindle Create, that can be used by self-publishers to convert Word documents for Kindle. Any books produced using that tool will be in KFX format and will support Enhanced Typesetting. However Kindle Create is limited in the formatting options it supports.

Other than that, publishers submit their source files to Amazon and Amazon automatically runs kfxgen on them to produce a copy in KFX format. The conversion process can fail if there are problems with the content. It is up to the publisher to correct and resubmit the book, if that happens.

Kfxgen is also built into the Kindle Previewer. Publishers can use that to test if their books will support Enhanced Typesetting without having to submit them to Amazon.

The older kindlegen software, which produces MOBI and KF8 formats, is more forgiving. It will accept content that might display incorrectly or inconsistently on Kindle apps and devices. So just about any book will be made available in those formats, even if it has problems.

Some examples of content that will pass kindlegen but fail kfxgen are: complex SVG images, complex or nested tables, tables with negative margins, content in unsupported languages, unsupported CSS (eg: counter-increment, first-letter selector with non alpha text), unresolved internal links, and non-numeric page numbers.

The Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines does a fairly good job of stating what is and isn't supported.

[jhowell]

One other note:

In the early days of Enhanced Typesetting the kfxgen program didn't support some commonly used e-book content, such as tables. For a while only about half of the Kindle books for sale supported Enhanced Typesetting. Publishers were told to wait for improvements to kfxgen rather than changing their books.

These days kfxgen supports pretty much everything that it is going to and over 95% of Kindle books have Enhanced Typesetting. If a book does not support ET at this point it is up to the publisher to make it compatible.

[odamizu]

Thanks as always, jhowell, for the detailed explanation. I feel like I should pay you tuition for all that you have taught me over the years

Originally Posted by jhowell

... publishers submit their source files to Amazon and Amazon automatically runs kfxgen on them to produce a copy in KFX format. The conversion process can fail if there are problems with the content. It is up to the publisher to correct and resubmit the book, if that happens ...

Ooh. So the Amazon customer rep was correct when they said it was the publisher's "fault" — not that they put it in those exact words, but I was skeptical when they tried to pass the buck. My bad.

Some examples of content that will pass kindlegen but fail kfxgen are: complex SVG images, complex or nested tables, tables with negative margins, content in unsupported languages, unsupported CSS (eg: counter-increment, first-letter selector with non alpha text), unresolved internal links, and non-numeric page numbers.

Interesting. This is a straight text novel, no tables, though there is a map. Now I want to pick apart the KF8 and try to figure out why it failed kfxgen

[Notjohn]

I upload a verified epub to the KDP. Since enhanced typesetting was introduced, all my books have had it. I did nothing to make that happen.

[odamizu]

While this is pretty much a straight text novel and there are no tables, there is one map. I can only guess the publisher did some SVG thing with the map that kfxgen didn't like?

Also, I couldn't figure out how to figure this out without the original source material. As far as I can tell the original source was not in the AZW file, so KindleUnpack couldn't extract it, it could only extract images and unpack raw markup language then build an epub from that.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by odamizu

While this is pretty much a straight text novel and there are no tables, there is one map. I can only guess the publisher did some SVG thing with the map that kfxgen didn't like?

Also, I couldn't figure out how to figure this out without the original source material. As far as I can tell the original source was not in the AZW file, so KindleUnpack couldn't extract it, it could only extract images and unpack raw markup language then build an epub from that.

If you start with a KF8 (azw3) file, kindleunpack with produce an EPUB that is very close to the original source file supplied to Amazon by the publisher, at least for books that started as an EPUB. You can open that EPUB in Amazon's Kindle Previewer to verify that Enhanced Typesetting is not supported. Using a MOBI (azw) file will produce less accurate results.

Determining the reason for failure can be tricky. Kfxgen does produce some error messages that can give a hint of where to look for the problem, but the Kindle Previewer does not report them to the user. My KFX Output plugin for calibre will expose the error messages produced during KFX conversion, but it also automatically fixes some problems in the source file and so it may or may not be useful in finding the problem with this particular book.

If you want to share the ASIN, I can take a look at the free sample to see if I can find anything in the first 10% of the book that is blocking KFX conversion.

[odamizu]

... My KFX Output plugin for calibre will expose the error messages produced during KFX conversion ...

This is so excellent! I ran the kindleunpack epub through your KFX Output plugin, and out popped the error!

ERROR: KFX conversion failed ... Kindle Previewer error: Error:E00829: Non-alphanumeric character is not supported with ::FirstLetter selector

Then, curiosity whetted, I ran the second book in the series (which was formatted with similar if not identical CSS and also had a map) through the KFX Output plugin, and it converted the epub to KFX fine.

This is so cool! Thanks again, jhowell, for teaching me so much!

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by odamizu

ERROR: KFX conversion failed ... Kindle Previewer error: Error:E00829: Non-alphanumeric character is not supported with ::FirstLetter selector

I have seen several books published by HarperCollins fail conversion for that reason. (I think that Amazon is being overly strict in their interpretation of ::first-letter.)

Originally Posted by odamizu

This is so cool! Thanks again, jhowell, for teaching me so much!

You're welcome!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I have seen several books published by HarperCollins fail conversion for that reason. (I think that Amazon is being overly strict in their interpretation of ::first-letter.)

It might just be that Amazon haven't worked out how to do an initial drop cap nicely when the first character is punctuation.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It might just be that Amazon haven't worked out how to do an initial drop cap nicely when the first character is punctuation.

Who has? LOL, you want to see a fistfight amongst typographers, start a discussion about the "right" way to set Drop punctuation. Hilarious, really.

Hitch

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Who has? LOL, you want to see a fistfight amongst typographers, start a discussion about the "right" way to set Drop punctuation. Hilarious, really.

True. Perhaps that's why they don't support it in Enhanced Typesetting.

[odamizu]

Wow, it's as simple as that? If a book has drop punctuation it fails kfxgen?

But KFX support drop caps if it doesn't have punctuation?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by odamizu

Wow, it's as simple as that? If a book has drop punctuation it fails kfxgen?

But KFX support drop caps if it doesn't have punctuation?

Hell, not that I've ever seen, not the Amazon process. We make eBooks with drops all the time...tables, yes. Dropcaps, no.

Hitch

[odamizu]

I figured it out!

This is what the publisher used, which produces successful KFX with a big initial dropcap: "Hello there."

<p class="x03-CO-Body-Text">“Hello there.”</p>

p.x03-CO-Body-Text::first-letter{
	font-size:2.6em;
	line-height:0.85;
	float:left;
	margin:0 0.05em 0 0;
}

But in two instances, the dropcap also needed italics, and the publisher put the quote mark outside of the italics, which caused kfxgen to fail:

<p class="x03-CO-Body-Text">"<i>Why is the quote mark outside the italics??"</i></p>

But if they had moved the quote mark inside the italics, kfxgen would have succeeded:

<p class="x03-CO-Body-Text"><i>"Why didn't the publisher do it this way?"</i></p>