295 blank pages at end of epub on iPad

[JoseWriter]

I created an epub using InDesign cc 2014 and exported it to reflowable 2.0.1 epub. I use kindlegen to create the kindle version and it looks great. I download the epub to my Nook and it looks ok, except that the frigging fonts don't come over. On my iPad it looks beautiful when I port it over using iTunes and viewing it using iBooks, except for one thing: it puts almost 300 blank pages at the end of the book. When I view the epub using Oxygen, those pages do not exist. The last file in the epub is the one that should end the book.

I've tried adding "back-of-book" to the Guide section but that did nothing.

Anyone have any ideas? The blank pages do not appear on the kindle or the nook versions, just on the ipad.

[dgatwood]

I suggest filing a bug.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by JoseWriter

Anyone have any ideas? The blank pages do not appear on the kindle or the nook versions, just on the ipad.

Maybe the last file got corrupted during the export and contains invisible control characters that Kindlegen and the Nook Rendering engine ignore.

It couldn't hurt to check the end of the last .xhtml file in the book for invisible control characters with a hex editor (e.g. XV32). (You should only see 0A or 0D0A for line breaks and 20 for spaces.)

[JoseWriter]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Maybe the last file got corrupted during the export and contains invisible control characters that Kindlegen and the Nook Rendering engine ignore.

It couldn't hurt to check the end of the last .xhtml file in the book for invisible control characters with a hex editor (e.g. XV32). (You should only see 0A or 0D0A for line breaks and 20 for spaces.)

Doitsu, that was not the exact solution, but you did cause me to go and examine the last file in the epub. What I found was several hundred of these, following the final text and image on the last page:

<div class="_idGenObjectLayout-1">
<div id="_idContainer176" class="_idGenObjectStyleOverride-1">
</div>
</div>

They just went on and on, from idContainer176 to 400+. I deleted them with Oxygen epub editor, and the new file looks great on the ipad. Thanks so much!
Jose

[crankypants]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

I suggest filing a bug.

The bug is Kindlegen itself. I used it a few years ago. It's just awful.

OP, do everything you can to avoid using Kindlegen. I believe you can upload a Word DOCX file to Amazon.

Also, many websites do their own processing on the ebook. The more software the ebook goes through, the more problems are compounded. (I'm a programmer, we try to keep it simple.)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by crankypants

The bug is Kindlegen itself. I used it a few years ago. It's just awful.

OP, do everything you can to avoid using Kindlegen. I believe you can upload a Word DOCX file to Amazon.

That's really not very good advice to give someone. Kindlegen is by far the best tool to use when preparing books for commercial Kindle publication.

It's constantly being revised. I very much doubt that a bug you encountered "a few years ago" is still present in the current version.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by crankypants

The bug is Kindlegen itself. I used it a few years ago. It's just awful.

Ah. I missed that this was Kindle, and mentally assumed iBooks. My bad. You're right. Kindlegen is a disaster and a half, and I'm being generous.

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's constantly being revised. I very much doubt that a bug you encountered "a few years ago" is still present in the current version.

Their rate of churn is actually a problem from my perspective. Every time they change something, they seem to introduce major behavior changes while fixing minor bugs. I stopped adopting kindlegen updates a long time ago, because each update caused me to waste two or three days tweaking my toolchain's output so that kindlegen would spit out sensible code that would work reasonably on KF7 devices again.