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Tom Tomasko
Known Participant
December 2, 2023
Answered

Kindle Previewer 3 gives error message regarding bad links

  • December 2, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 981 views

Hello,

I am creating an ebook and testing out things in Kindle Previewer 3. I get an error message that two endnotes need "Please update a valid external URL. " This seems weird because scores of endnotes have dead links and I want them to remain that way. But Kindle says two of them are bad when actually all of them are "bad."

 

Any ideas on how I can fix this so I do not get these error messages?

 

Thanks.

Tom

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

    What a mess. Deleting and then pasting back in the offending text did nothing. Saving as idml did work except a different piece of text that is a dead link to a website now surfaces. And I lost the links to my (few) footnotes. Time to take a break.

     

    Just went back to my original. Everything works but I get messages in Quality Check that the footnotes are not backlinked. But they are working.


    Did this book originate in Word, and then import to ID? That's another whole chain of possible faults.

     

    When you replace the footnotes, or any time you do that kind of step, it's critical to make sure you delete everything that could contain a bad link. If, for example, you have a footnote at the end of a paragraph, cut ALL the text of about the last sentence in the first para and the first one in the second and delete it from the document. That should remove the footnote, the reference any any stray bits of a broken or orphaned link.

     

    THEN paste the text back in using a "plain text" option; the best trick might be to paste it into Notepad, then cut and paste it from there. That keeps old 'crud' from getting pasted back in.

     

    THEN insert a new footnote and paste similarly clean text into it.

     

    A lot of steps but it does little good to cut and paste a broken or orphaned link back into the doc.

    1 reply

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    December 2, 2023

    End notes are a huge PITA in EPUB and Kindle. They're kind of like those two-foot blown-glass sailing ships you see at fairs.. no one is ever going to get one home intact. 🙂

     

    Does the error identify which notes are causing the error? Or is it just some pair among the many?

      T
      Tom TomaskoAuthor
      Known Participant
      December 2, 2023

      Yes, the error identifies the two "errors." I am not sure this has anything to do with the fact that they are endnotes.

      James Gifford—NitroPress
      James Gifford—NitroPress
      Legend
      December 2, 2023

      If you know which two entries are causing the problem, delete them (both reference and note, if necessary) and re-enter them.

       

      You might want to try the ID purge-fix first: save the file to IDML, then open and save that as an INDD file under a new name. Try the export again. Then try the fix above, and try the export again. Somewhere in there, the links should be unkinked.

       

      That purge helps a lot of EPUB export faults, especially when a file has many links (TOC, index, cross-ref, end note) and is edited substantially after those links are created. Some breakages from editing are tolerated internally — that is, a print version would show no problems — but EPUB export is so fussy that trivial faults will throw such errors.

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