A short blog today because it’s just too pretty to stay inside and work! 61 degrees and clear here on the coast of Maine, with a high today of about 75.

Well, I’ve been struggling with trying to make an epub (the silk purse) into a mobi (the sow’s ear) for months.  I know Kindle Preview/Kindlegen is the Amazon prefered way and I have already had one mobi file (made by Calibre) refused by Amazon (which they are threatening to do with all Calibre-built mobis), but I just can’t get the output that I want through Kindle Previewer/Kindlegen.

The trouble is in the “Center” style in the original Word document which goes through so many permutations before it gets to anyone!  When I build a style in Word it asks for what Style the new Style is based on (I normally say… Normal) and also the style that will be following it. Again I say Normal, because that’s, well… normally the case.  I’ve noticed though that unless blocks of text are Styled together in this “Center” style… the next line of text (outside the block) drops its style off unless it is actually styled ‘Normal’.  Does this make sense to you?

Example:   Center:  3 lines of a very nice review.  Then I go back and pick up the next line which happens to be a title… so I style it also as ‘Center’ but with a little futz to the font size and line spacing and in Word it’s fine, in Calibre Epub it’s fine, in a Calibre Mobi file it’s fine… but in the epub-generated Kindlegen Mobi, that style reverts to ‘Normal’ obviously following the instructions in the original ‘Center’ Style… following style – Normal… and ignoring that this title is also styled ‘Center’.  At least I think that’s the problem, because the wonkiness seems to be centering around this ‘Center’ style issue.

Needs more experimentation, yes?  I’ll let you know.  This issue needs to be solved ASAP before Amazon truly decides that it’s their way or the highway!