Yesterday I took another trip around the world to get to my neighbor’s house.
Here’s what I mean.
The Kindle Previewer in night view was giving me trouble, but only for the Smashwords converted mobi file. The file I created with Jutoh and the one I created with Calibre were fine. Since those are the ones I upload and sell through other distributors, that’s good. But I couldn’t let the Smashwords issue go. I worked on trying to figure out what it was in my Word doc that was causing it. I even went so far as to generate a Smashwords odt file through Jutoh and tweaked it for Smashwords and the problem still didn’t go away. I was seriously on the verge of pulling out my hair when I decided to put that file on my actual Kindle (Fire) and see if it was a real problem or if the previewer had a bug.
Well, I don’t know that it’s a bug in the previewer because the previewer showed the font just fine in night view for my own mobi file. But when I side-loaded the Smashwords mobi directly onto my Kindle (I didn’t want the issue to get resolved by some conversion process if I used Send to Kindle to do it) and … no problems. None. Night view looked fine, although I can tell that there’s something going on with the file because in Sepia view the font is a bit darker than it should be compared to the mobi versions of the book I created in Jutoh and in Calibre (and compared to some other books on my Kindle too).
But I wasted hours trying to track down whatever might be causing the issue, because even after that, I didn’t give up. I tried setting after setting in Word, but nothing fixed it. I went so far as to delete my custom normal.dot file, copy all the text into a new document, and more.
Nothing fixed the issue. All I can figure is that it’s something to do with Smashwords’ own conversion process.
Regardless, I finally got over it my anxiety about this unexplained issue after I went back and pulled some of my older mobi files from Smashwords and checked them too. This problem’s been going on since 2012 at least, at least for my own Smashwords mobi files. I finally gave up trying to find a reason. I know I’ve checked the night view before, but since I’d always checked the Smashwords mobi by sending it to my Kindle, I’d never noticed the problem.
My decision to be more thorough this time and check the Smashwords mobi with the Kindle Previewer instead of just on my Kindle turned out not to be such a great idea. :o