At the end of each chapter in my book, I have a small red heart symbol for closure (the heart from the card set in the Symbol font). I do the same thing on my companion website. Here’s what it looks like (except for the red color)…
Ready? Let’s begin….︎
However, when I compile to .mobi, a red box is added after the heart which is not in the document. Like this…
Ready? Let’s begin…. ︎☐
I have been unable to find a way to keep the box from appearing. Adding a space after, changing the color and trying different symbols make no difference (the box doesn’t show up when exporting to a .docx file). Any ideas how to keep the heart and lose the box?
My guess would be that the heart symbol you are using isn’t something that can be easily displayed by the Kindle font. As you note, it requires a special font to display it to begin with, and the Kindle doesn’t have Apple Symbol installed.
It’s up to what the target format supports though. If the Kindle font has the arrow symbol then it will display it properly. The only solution I am aware of is to find symbols that work, like that arrow, and only use those.
Well, you can turn them into graphics and insert them that way—but I really wouldn’t recommend that. They won’t scale with the reader’s font setting, and Kindle still doesn’t support transparency last I checked, so they’ll look broken on anything but white.
I’m not sure what you mean—the only way I know of to figure out if another platform/font supports a symbol is to test. The most efficient approach would be to try a bunch at once and see what works and what doesn’t.
As to what the software itself supports, that probably won’t help you out much where it comes to figuring out what works on a Kindle. Scrivener, or more accurately the macOS text editing platform, is capable of using thousands of fonts and millions of symbols. But for the record, the system character browser, which is automatically inserted into Scrivener’s menu system as Edit/Emoji & Symbols… is the place to find it can handle. That’s going to be easiest way to insert symbols to test with as well. Though you might search online and see if anyone has done the research, or if maybe even Amazon themselves publish the character sets they support.
Hearts, of course. That’s an odd one. Those characters are old, I remember using them on DOS computers in the early '80s. They were what counted for “graphics” in some old games.
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That’s an odd one. Those characters are old, I remember using them on DOS computers in the early '80s. They were what counted for “graphics” in some old games.