Odd font regression in Kindle Previewer, and online

[dgatwood]

I'm about to push a book through KDP, and noticed a weird problem. In my book, every single glyph is replaced with a rectangular box in the default font size, as though the font is missing literally every character, and all font sizes are being ignored.

With an earlier Kindle Previewer app on my Mac, I had problems with Kindle's Paperwhite mode (removed in the current version) doing that, but only when a built-in font was selected—it worked correctly in "Publisher Defaults" mode—so I assumed it was simply a font problem on that machine. Now that I'm seeing the same behavior in the online KDP previewer (and on a much wider range of devices), I'm a little more concerned.

Given that text is text, and can't possibly be anything but text, and given that it obviously is failing with Amazon's fonts, rather than with my own, I'm inclined to assume that Kindle Previewer (including the version they use on their website) has simply become broken beyond all repair, but I was wondering if other folks have noticed this problem with their KF8 books.

[dgatwood]

Looks like KDP ingest is deleting the fonts, resulting in all sorts of aberrant behavior. I can tell, because when I download the "Book Preview File", all the fonts are missing, and my "You're overriding the publisher default fonts" canary is showing in red.

Does anybody know of a way to get Kindle content onto Amazon's store that does not involve KDP and its broken ingest process?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

Looks like KDP ingest is deleting the fonts, resulting in all sorts of aberrant behavior. I can tell, because when I download the "Book Preview File", all the fonts are missing, and my "You're overriding the publisher default fonts" canary is showing in red.

Does anybody know of a way to get Kindle content onto Amazon's store that does not involve KDP and its broken ingest process?

dg:

We, you and I, are discussing this very situation--your font characters are outside of the available character slots--in another thread. On any device that can't show an embedded font, you're going to have that problem. Even if you could FTP the files, you'll have the same issue.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

dg:

We, you and I, are discussing this very situation--your font characters are outside of the available character slots--in another thread. On any device that can't show an embedded font, you're going to have that problem. Even if you could FTP the files, you'll have the same issue.

Hitch

And that will still be an issue even if the font stays embedded in the version Amazon sells because in order ot see the font, the user has to turn on Publisher Font and most don't even bother to check if there are any embedded fonts.

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Hitch

dg:

We, you and I, are discussing this very situation--your font characters are outside of the available character slots--in another thread. On any device that can't show an embedded font, you're going to have that problem. Even if you could FTP the files, you'll have the same issue.

No, they aren't. That's what is so bizarre. The book's HTML was 100% low ASCII, with all special characters entity-encoded. If all the text fell outside the standard range of characters supported by normal fonts, the books would fail on the Kindle DX, which doesn't support embedded fonts. It works fine on the DX. It only failed on devices that support embedded fonts, and only on certain versions of Kindle Previewer.

What's fascinating is that both problems—the online reader showing square boxes and Kindle for Mac using the default fonts when opening the downloadable preview—went away completely when I removed the

text-rendering: geometricPrecision;

line from the stylesheet.

So apparently, there are many different triggers that can cause KDP to do something really bizarre, and at least one of those triggers causes KDP to somehow corrupt the MOBI output in such a way that some readers believe that the font files are there, but cannot parse them, resulting in a failure to correctly load the font, but still resulting in an attempt to use the font, thus the square boxes (caused by trying to display a font that contains no glyphs).

It's really quite bizarre, and may or may not be in any way related to the bugs you saw.