Why is my Kindle formatting weird?
October 3, 2011 10:52 PM   Subscribe

Kindle formatting gone wild. I've been working on converting a .PDF to a Kindle File (.mobi) and I'm almost there . . .except for one pesky problem.

The file looks great when I navigate through the book using the links in the table of contents - both paging forwards and back--but when I attempt to read the book start-to-finish, all the text is underlined! (needless to say I did not code it as such!) The source html looks fine in a browser. I am on deadline and at my wit's end. Please hope me!
posted by sideofwry to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Browsers are notoriously tolerant of bad HTML. The Kindle may be less tolerant.

Have you tried putting an HTML strict DTD at the top to see if that makes any difference to what a web browser sees?

You could try opening up the code in emacs, which will attempt to show the text as it will be displayed along with the tags: sometimes that helps to track down the error.

A third possibility is that there's some wayward CSS which is causing the underlining. Again, the Kindle (well mobipocket) HTML interpreter is fairly dumb & may well give different results to a full-fat web browser.
posted by pharm at 3:04 AM on October 4, 2011


You could try running it through Calibre to clean it up.
posted by conrad53 at 5:54 AM on October 4, 2011


Don't use Calibre -- it will add nonvalidating junk. Try posting this question to #ePrdctn on Twitter or to Quora. That's where the experts hang out.
posted by libraryhead at 7:09 AM on October 4, 2011


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