BUG: List items not justified randomly with MOBI, fine in EPUB

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi there,

I have a weird issue in my last manuscript.

I have lists with checkmarks. The paragraphs are “no style”, and the layout asks for all paragraphs to be justified.

In PDF and EPUB, the list show as expected, with all the items justified. No problem. I use Books and Adobe Digital Editions to check them, and they are impeccable (thanks Scrivener!).

With MOBI, randomly, in about half the chapters, these items are not justified.

When they are as expected, all the items in that list are justified.

When they are not, all the items in that list are not justified.

I doubled checked for invisibles (it’s the same manuscript and I use the same compile format file for both), nothing.

It’s clearly not a MOBI limitation given that half the lists shwo as expected.

So unless it’s a bug in the Kindle reader (unlikely), it seems to point to a bug in Scrivener. I use the latest MAC version.

Any idea?

Thanks!

2

I know this doesn’t address any Scrivener bug, however I’ve found compiling to ePub then doing a Mobi conversion in Calibre (free) seems to give a more consistent output.

Also uploading ePub to Amazon and letting them do the conversion gave a solid result.

3

What version of KindleGen are you using? Have you updated to the latest and greatest?

4

This is good advice.

Scrivener generates an ePub file, then hands it off to Amazon’s tools for conversion. So any differences between the two are due to either Amazon’s converter or the reader.

Katherine

5

Thank you all, sorry for the late reply, I had forgotten to subscribe to the thread.

Yes, I had checked that Kindlegen was the latest version, so we can rule this out, as long as V2.9 from 2014 (for 386 processors!) is the latest. That’s what Amazon offers here: amazon.com/gp/feature.html? … 1000765211

Is there a more recent version?

Compiling to EPUB improved marginally at first, because after uploading to KDP and letting Amazon do the conversion, the paragraphs were justified but the bullet points were still wrong (on the same random chapters). The first line were indented, and there was too much space between the bullet point and the paragraph.

However, I soon found the culprit. It looks like the “optimize for Kindle” is not so optimized. Not sure what it does, but as soon as I turned it off, KDP produced the expected formatting, with both the correct bullet points (as in the other chapters) and justified.

I have checked and all the sections have the same type (headed section), so the compiler should handle them the same. I’ve also checked and all the paragraphs have no style or manual formatting (I cleared it), so not a reason either for why some cestions and not others.

In any case, compiling to EPUB without optimizing for Kindle gave the best results, You might want to take a look at why the optimization seems to be breaking something.

I’ll try MOBI again if there is a newer version of Kindlegen, in the meantime having only one EPUB for everything is very convenient. If Bookfunnel produces the same results, I’ll stick to a single EPUB file for my ebooks and I’ll KDP and BB deal with it.

Thank you all again for the great suggestions. :slight_smile:

6

The version of KindleGen that’s embedded in Kindle Previewer is substantially newer. Apparently Amazon hasn’t released it as an independent download.

Scrivener 3.1.3 will use the Kindle Previewer version if it’s available, so you might want to upgrade if you haven’t already.

Katherine

7

Thank you Katherine. I have the Kindle previewer installed but I think I point manually to the kindlegen linked above. I’ll try that.

8

So I installed the latest Kindle Previewer on the Mac (it wasn’t installed, it was only installed on my PC). Scrivener 3.1.3 started using it right away instead of my old Kindlegen.

When generated the MOBI, it fixed the non-justified issue, but the bullet points are still wrong.

So the perfect results are still letting KDP do the conversion from an EPUB non-optimized for Kindle.

Out of interest, what is the optimization supposed to do?