After some research I found that Kindle does not support tabs. I have corrected the document that has tabs to be indents or line breaks as required, however I still have a format issue that I can’t find a fix for. It is to do with the inline tabs in the document.
The best I can think of would be to use a table with no borders, so that the reader cannot see there is a table there. The underlying problem is that e-books use Web-based technology to display books, they are almost like little self-contained websites. Unfortunately that means they suffer from all of the limitations of that format, and lacking tab stops is one of them. Tabs are just ignored in HTML, or worse, can break text display in some user agents (like older Nooks).
Great Idea, unfortunately the document is 100 pages long when printed on letter size. Adding in a table with the information sounds to time consuming for this project.
Is there some sort of inline formatting that can replace the tabs, spaces, or underscores, or dashes and make the color invisible? Other ideas out there?
The problem is that all of the solutions I can think of involve some complicated HTML+CSS layout, which probably won’t work on these readers anyway. It’s a rather small subset of what can be one with, say, a web page. That aside, the way it is composed in your draft makes it difficult to inject raw HTML instructions. It would be as difficult to convert to a system that does that, as it would be to convert to tables, so I doubt that’s worth even looking in to.
But, on the other hand, if you have some web design chops, you could give it a go by modifying the output source files. There is a flag in the KindleGen compile option pane that will output a source file folder. You’ll have full control over every bit of content and structure that makes up the Mobi. Edit the contents of that as you require, then open the provided OPF file in Kindle Previewer to have it turn it into a Mobi file and preview it for you.
I would like to stay away from modifying the output source files, as my web skills are not great. I am hoping to find a solution within the capabilities of Scrivener, maybe its best to re think the format, however I have grown fond of the layout of the abbreviations of the character speaking on the left and the text spoken on the right.
