Extra spaces in AZW3 format on Kindle

[ozshots]

Hi,
I am embedding font in AZW3 format for correct presentation on Kindle.

It nearly works; looks perfectly fine on Calibre e-book viewer but renders with extra spaces on Kindle Paperwhite and older Kindle.

See attached first line, second word: "kahwha:" vs "kahw ha:"
More examples below if you look carefully at screenshots.
The font itself renders just fine.

AZW3 file is attached together with screenshots. What I'm doing wrong?

PS I've tried couple of other fonts and result is exactly the same.
Thanks a lot for your help!

[Doitsu]

The problem appears to be be that your source files are not fully Unicode encoded and the embedded font most likely also uses a non-standard encoding.
Can you post the actual .html or text source files and the (Slavonic?) encoding scheme that you used?

[itimpi]

The Calibre ebook viewer is really an epub viewer. This means that if you ask Calibre to view an azw3 book it under-the-cover converts it to epub and then displays the results. This means it may not accurately reflect what the real devices will do.

To get a more accurate representation of how it will look on a real Kindle device you should use the Amazon Kindle previewer app.

[ozshots]

Hi,
I tried Kindle viewer and it looks fine - attached.

I've also attached a text version of input RTF. If you apply correct font, it looks fine on all viewers.

The problem as you've pointed is encoding. This is old Slavonic text; there are plenty of websites and they all only displayed correctly if you have the right fonts installed. They are compartible with each other.

Easiest format to read is PDF with embedded fonts; it always looks right on all devices.
I'm really keen to use native Kindle format instead of PDF...

Some encoding symbols can be seen here, I have not find a better explanantion of this encoding.
http://www.fonts2u.com/orthodoxtt-ucs8.font

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by ozshots

I tried Kindle viewer and it looks fine - attached.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything. Kindle Previewer uses the Webkit engine and behaves like a web browser.

Originally Posted by ozshots

I've also attached a text version of input RTF. If you apply correct font, it looks fine on all viewers.

Unfortunately, the text displays as garbage in Unicode viewers, because it's not Unicode encoded.

Originally Posted by ozshots

I'm really keen to use native Kindle format instead of PDF...

I'm afraid that won't be possible because of a bug in the Kindle rendering engine. I just did a quick test with a Unicode version and an Unicode font and noticed the same issue even though I embedded a Unicode font (the default code2000 fallback font behaves the same). Apparently the rendering engine cannot handle Cyrillic letters followed by the Unicode character U+0484 COMBINING CYRILLIC PALATALIZATION and adds a space after it.

For example, the second word in the first line, канѡ҄на (kanyona?), contains U+0461 (omega) followed by U+0484 (palatalization), which the Kindle cannot handle.

[ozshots]

Thanks a lot for your help guys...

It is very disappointing to see Kindle as the only e-book on the market not supporting Slavonic due to defective software.
I will write to Kindle support about this.

If Amazon choses not to support epub, at least home grown alternative should work properly!