[MT Berlyn]

Hi,

I made a minor adjustment (word change) to my book, and I always check the preview on KDP after making any change. This time, however, some of the paragraph spacings have gone a little off track.  A few words appear double-spaced. I checked the html file and can find no issue.  The "Look Inside" appears fine and the mobi preview web browser is fine.  I don't know which preview to trust now.  The Kindle Fire preview on KDP seems to be more out of whack than the Kindle reader option preview.  I've never experienced a problem before this last update/upload.  Any ideas?

Thanks~

 

[Klip]

Do you mean there are extra spaces between some words? Some kindles add justification to the text and that spacing happens. No way of preventing it.

 

[MT Berlyn]

There are a few spots where there are some extra spaces between words, yes.  Some of the paragraphs seem out of whack suddenly.

I'll use this rhyme as an example of what I mean:

    Jack and Jill went up the hill
    Jack and Jill went up the hill
         Jack and Jill went up the hill
    Jack and Jill went up the hill
    Jack and Jill went up the hill
       Jack and Jill went up the hill
    Jack and Jill went up the hill
    Jack and Jill went up the hill
              Jack and Jill went up the hill

I've just never noticed it on the KDP preview before.  Is it something I should be concerned with?  I can't change the html file, because I don't see any glitches in it.

 

[Lummox JR]

Are you certain the HTML file is glitchless? Are you looking at the file in a browser/viewer or in the source itself? There was another writer recently who thought their file was fine, till they cracked open the source. It's highly probable that any inconsistency comes from there.

 

[gregm]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.

Look in the html for these little gremlins. "non breaking spaces". I can't remember the code off the top of my noggin right now, but I have run into it from time to time. Not guaranteeing that is your problem, just something to look for.

 

[Pearson Moore]

Thayer,

I recommend looking at the problematic text in a true HTML editor.  You're going to find the problem if you look closely enough.  Another way to do this that has never failed me is to analyse the passage using MS Word's paragraph editor.

 

[Klip]

It is of course, possible that there is some glitch in the HTML, but this kind of strange word spacing does happen for no reason because of the strange justification that Kindle forces on the text. If that is the problem, there is nothing you can do about it. It happens in all books on those devices.

Here is another post about it in a different forum, describing the issue better than I can: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=204819

It might be caused by non breaking spaces -- if you open the text in an HTML editor (Notepad ++, JEdit, or similar) look for &npbsp;

 

[gregm]

Thanks Masha, I be brain dead this afternoon.

 

[MT Berlyn]

Thank you!  Thank you!  I went through the html with a fine tooth comb and found the gremlin.  It was as suggested...space breaks in the and I have spent the afternoon going through and fixing them one by one, hoping I caught each one.  I re-uploaded and it looks better.  Is there a way to prevent this in future or, does it just happen?

I am exhausted.

 

[gregm]

The difference usually but not always pop's up with the difference in "Character Encoding of databases"

Western (ISO 8859-1) and Unicode (UTF-

As a site Admin I see it often when someone copies and past something like a blog post, then pastes  on to my forum. A lot of html is displayed using a database to retrieve the information.

If the database is encoded in "UTF-8 and then pasted into a site that use's "ISO-8859-1 those gremlins appear.

You can download a very good TXT editor called TextPad online.(it's free)
Open your html file into TextPad and 'find' any word or code and proceed to delete it, then click next to find the next one.

You can also use the word/code replace function in TextPad to change words without scanning the whole file manually.

You still with me? 

 

[Lissie]

Thank you! Thank you! I went through the html with a fine tooth comb and found the gremlin. It was as suggested...space breaks in the and I have spent the afternoon going through and fixing them one by one, hoping I caught each one.

Don't hope - did you use search and replace to find them all? Doing anything like that manually is just asking for trouble because you'll miss one - always try and use search and replace to get rid of this type of mistake. FWIW I use notepad++ free and has really powerful searching features

 

[MT Berlyn]

The difference usually but not always pop's up with the difference in "Character Encoding of databases"

Western (ISO 8859-1) and Unicode (UTF-

As a site Admin I see it often when someone copies and past something like a blog post, then pastes on to my forum. A lot of html is displayed using a database to retrieve the information.

If the database is encoded in "UTF-8 and then pasted into a site that use's "ISO-8859-1 those gremlins appear.

You can download a very good TXT editor called TextPad online.(it's free)
Open your html file into TextPad and 'find' any word or code and proceed to delete it, then click next to find the next one.

You can also use the word/code replace function in TextPad to change words without scanning the whole file manually.

You still with me?

Thank you. I'm going to look up TextPad right away. I re-uploaded the repaired html at around 5 PM or so and received the email notice of publication around 12:30 AM. The "Look Inside" appears off center a bit, so I re-checked the preview and it was fine. I re-uploaded the file again and checked the preview...which still looks fine, at least on Kindle preview. The Kindle Fire preview still looks slightly off, though. I will check again in the morning.

Don't hope - did you use search and replace to find them all? Doing anything like that manually is just asking for trouble because you'll miss one - always try and use search and replace to get rid of this type of mistake. FWIW I use notepad++ free and has really powerful searching features

I do use notepad, but it is an old version. You are right about not hoping, which is what I did...hope. I just can't believe the formatting went out of whack like that. This never occurred before and I've updated a few times over the past year.

Again, thank you so much. This was all so unsettling and I'm not very tech savvy, which doesn't help the situation.