Amazon Look Inside books, some work, some don't.

[serendipity22]

I convert html to epub with Sigil.

The graphics are fine when viewing in a web browser, sigil, cloud reader, kindle previewer,
kindle online previewers etc.

In some ebooks the graphics work with 'Look Inside' and not with others,
even though the code is the same.

Gaps appear in the tables between the rows.

The diagram on the right is correct.

Anyone have any ideas?

[DiapDealer]

Is this really a Sigil topic? If Sigil is not introducing the issue, then the answer is probably no. I'm going to move the discussion to the Kindle Formats forum.

[jhowell]

I can't tell you why Amazon's Look Inside gives different results across your books. I know that other author/publishers have complained about odd behavior in that feature.

One issue is that your book will be delivered to most customers using newer Kindle apps and devices in KFX format. Conversion to KFX applies several heuristics meant to improve the layout of text within a book, but this doesn't work well with what you are doing by using a grid of individual piece images to make a chess board. While your second image with no gaps may be what you prefer, the actual books your readers see will look more like the first image in many cases.

I had the free sample of your book "Think Like a Computer" delivered to Kindle for PC on my computer. It was delivered in KFX format. I have attached some screenshots of how the first chess board in that book appears with various font size and line spacing settings.

I believe that you would have better results if you made the entire chess board a single image instead.

[Notjohn]

I can't imagine doing it any other way than as a single image, but then my formatting goals have never been ambitious -- and that by design!

The one time that I found LITB to be incompatible with what I wanted to do was in the use of 20 percent mug shots with text that flowed around the image. KF7 nor Look Inside won't play that game. I didn't mind how the text would look in the older Kindles, but I wanted the Look Inside sample to be reasonably close to what the customer would receive in the vast majority of cases. (After all, if one owns a Kindle or Kindle2 or DX, one is accustomed to the occasional odd presentation of images.) So I revised the first two such mug shots so that the image stood above the first line of text. Not great, but a fair compromise.

Similarly, I size any image intended to be small (those mug shots, plus my publisher colophon) so that they will not blow up to full screen, which is what KF7 tries to do. I can't remember the size of the mug shots, but the colophon is 100 pixels square. It looks okay on every device.

The better way to do this, of course, is to use media calls, but that again is beyond my ambition. I want my epubs to be lightweight and to work reasonably well on every conceivable device. I don't embed fonts or use drop-caps or even build a "mobi" version especially for Kindle.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

I can't imagine doing it any other way than as a single image, but then my formatting goals have never been ambitious -- and that by design!

The one time that I found LITB to be incompatible with what I wanted to do was in the use of 20 percent mug shots with text that flowed around the image. KF7 nor Look Inside won't play that game. I didn't mind how the text would look in the older Kindles, but I wanted the Look Inside sample to be reasonably close to what the customer would receive in the vast majority of cases. (After all, if one owns a Kindle or Kindle2 or DX, one is accustomed to the occasional odd presentation of images.) So I revised the first two such mug shots so that the image stood above the first line of text. Not great, but a fair compromise.

If you think of the LITB as being a KF7 device, you'll be safer. And what that means is, using tables to make these chess sets is NEVER going to work reliably.

The better way to do this, of course, is to use media calls, but that again is beyond my ambition. I want my epubs to be lightweight and to work reasonably well on every conceivable device. I don't embed fonts or use drop-caps or even build a "mobi" version especially for Kindle.

No, we're expert in MQs, and I wouldn't try to do this (chess tables) as a table. As JHowell showed, that looks fine, on a Fire, at a given font size, but it's a disaster waiting to happen, the minute it's on a smartphone, or, or or. I said this initially, on the first thread about this book, and I'll say it again, those need to be embedded as images. Otherwise, they're going to come out as garbage, on myriad devices.

Hitch