Keeping text out of the gutter on Amazon KDPP

[Kelli Jae Baeli]

I need some clarity on print novel formatting errors from KDPP. Amazon suddenly started rejecting print manuscripts due to infringement on the gutter by text. (I've never had this issue before).  I have always set all the margins and gutter to their specification, but still, the problem persists. I tweaked it enough last time to get the project through, but i have another thirty-two novels of mine that i will be updating in ID, and need to understand why this is happening and how to avoid it. Adobe support has been no help at all on this. They either address something i did not ask, or they condescend by explaining to me what a gutter is.
Here's the screenshot from Amazon KDPP

and here are my settings.

So perhaps the question is, what is the difference between margin/gutter settings AND the text frame that might be on the page? I place my text frames according to the guides created by the settings. Since most of these issues with KDPP seem to be about text infringing on the gutter, even when the page settings are correct, how do I keep this from happening? Don't the guides for the text frames match the appropriate space where text is allowed? If the proper settings won't do it, what will?

I appreciate any insight.

[Kelli Jae Baeli]

Wow, no responses? I'm still having this issue...can't anyone offer any sort of solution?

[positive_build0D4C]

I wish you'd had some advice on this, because I'm currently having the same problem.

I have a very complex layout, and changing the margins will throw it off, create new pages and pushing my graphics out of place and will force me to have to reset the entire layout with new pages, which also means I'll have to redo my cover to accommodate the extra pages.

This is a MAJOR pain, because I had the margins set according to Amazon KDP's requirements but they still want more room.

Here's the thing though. It's apparently my font, Adobe Jenson Pro, which has serifs, and the serifs are overhanging into the gutter. I think the question should be is there anyway to tell InDesign to just not let that happen? Something similar to optical margins. Maybe something in the Paragraph Style that tells it to not let the fonts overhang no matter what.

So, that's all I've got. Maybe check to see if Optical Margins is turned on. This causes text to overhang the margins. In my case, it's turned off and I'm still having the problem, but maybe check anyway.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

FWIW, the original inquiry probably went unanswered for a variety of reasons (other than just being overlooked).

KDP is famously, stubbornly, irredeemably opaque and arbitrary, and seem to have gotten only more so as time goes by. Errors, warnings and admin actions are often almost indecipherable as to real causes or reasons, and there are several cases where only a collateral error is given. (One is related to your problem; KDP will repeatedly insist that more bleed margin is needed, when the problem actually traces to 'live content' intrusion on the minimum margins.)

You don't give any details of your job, but if your margins are anywhere near the KDP minimum of 3/8" all around, your only real fix is to bring them in, especially on the inside ("gutter" — a misused term throughout KDP's docs) one. My observation is that even not-quite-novices tend to make the inside margin MUCH too narrow; KDP's variation of perfect binding is very tight already, with a full 3/8-inch clamp area.. An inch is the reasonable minimum for inside margins, no matter how vast it looks on the layout.

There can be other causes of the error you see and yes, it's often due to fonts with serifs, swashes and kerning that put letter elements outside the text frame. However, KDP largely doesn't care if these elements are outside your text frame and margins; they care if they are intruding into the page minimums. The solution is to pull your margins in from those technical minimums by some good amount, 1/8 inch or more.

Speaking more editorially than technically, most newcomers or modestly experienced designers tend to make book margins too small overall. There are many reasons to use not less than an inch inside, at least a half inch outside, and the same half inch top and bottom as the very narrowest margins for any print-on-demand service, especially KDP with, as noted its very tight spine binding and somewhat loose trim accuracy.

Sorry about your complex layout and time invested in it, but I doubt there is any solution but to pull it all in with wider margins.

[positive_build0D4C]

Yeah, the project is a 7x10 paperback with 0.5" margins everywhere except the inside which is 0.75". It has 11 documents as part of the whole book. I can kinda sorta fix things by moving the inside margin up to 0.765" on the inside which doesn't throw off most of the pages and create new pages but only ins some documents, because it does throw off other documents, shunting everything down, giving me overset errors. Also, InDesign has a major bug where when you use Adjust Layout, sometimes it doesn't move the actual text boxes, and other times it does. It also shunt graphics over to the opposite page on the page spreads, and then you have to individually click on each one and just nudge it once, and it magically pops back into place, as if it just needed a reminder of where it was supposed to be.

So, this is all just maddening in an already very tedious layout that took me over a week to complete. Frankly, I'm just too exhausted by it to look at it anymore.

I'm also perplexed by the fact that almost all of my books have used this font on KDP without issue, including the prior edition of this very same book, but suddenly it's now an issue. I don't know if KDP had suddenly become more sensitive lately or not, but there absolutely should be an option within InDesign to prevent serifs from dangling beyond the margins. Maybe some people will want that some of the time, but given that KDP is big now and most writers/publishers are publishing there, there needs to be a fix.

Also, optical margins did not work. I was able to get all the serifs within the margins, but then all the quotes were dangling, and there was no way to fix that.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Life with KDP. The only users I know of who don't have these perpetual technical glitches are those trained in conventional book layout, who among other things can understand/read between the lines of the abysmal KDP documentation (and don't rely on any of KDP's crappy tools to try to get to print).

But even then, the mysterious crypt keepers change things all the time, from small technical things like what you've encountered to overall policies about what constitute worthy material. I am a very experienced publisher and book designer, and I have three KDP stories (all losses) that are absolutely shocking in their bureacratic idiocy.

Not much you can do. In theory, you can reach KDP support; in practice, it seems to be AI or an ESL employee sending back response #4273-a by pushing a button.

I'd start by using wider inside margins. IME, 0.75 inches makes books just this -><- much too hard to read with KDP's tight bindings.

You can bump all your content out a bit and probably 'solve' the problem, but this might be a good point to take a day off, then come back and recast the book into a more standard layout you can repurpose for everything future and reprint. Because you sure as hack aren't going to get KDP to budge on it.

[positive_build0D4C]

Well, I already started some experimenting to find out what the bare minimum "magic number" is that will fix all the margins. I kept changing the margins in the first document until all those errors went away. It appears to be .77+. Once I start up again tomorrow, I'll then change all the documents' inside margins to that even if it means throwing my layout off. Then, I'll just have to reset everything including the cover and chalk it up to experience.

I still think Adobe could do something about it, though.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's not an Adobe problem. (I challenge you to find any other instance, at all, in any circumstance where it's an issue at all; while you're searching, you might note that these elegant old typefaces have been the same, including nominal elbows outside the text box, for centuries.)

It's a badly-written bot-driven pass-fail that has absolutely no judgment about whether the content is actually over a margin line. One of uncountable KDP "quality checks" that passeth undertanding and faileth submissions on pointless grounds.

But if a solution is needed, that 1-2mm or points inside margin takes care of it.Along with (kicks dead horse) using less, uh, marginal margins.

[positive_build0D4C]

I'm well aware that's how it's been for a long time. It's not about that. It's about right now. Things have changed. It makes no sense to have the fonts do something that you have no control over. The KDP thing doesn't make any sense either, but it doesn't, by existing, make Adobe Indesign allowing no user control over something make sense either. It's not about who's fault it is. It's about what is needed to get the job done, and changing an entire layout because Adobe doesn't allow for full control over the text in the document doesn't make sense no matter how much historical precedence there is.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The problem is, in its entirety, that one (1) completely idiosyncratic platform with too many quirks and faults to list finds this "overlap" a hard fail, with no judgment or appeal.

There is no second aspect to this. At all.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I'll just add this, perhaps more out of irritation than anything else: this is an example of what happens when a tech bro decides he's smarter than decades or centuries of prior art. No one in the history of typesetting, typography or book design has ever, ever concluded that a swash outside an arbitrary text line was a flaw — anyone in any posiition to look had enough knowledge and esthetic grasp to know that such things are intended with certain elegant font families.

But along comes a little cadre of Bezos-monkeys, using a hastily-design tech tool to monitor pixels and that arbitrary line, and write a rule that says if a serif falls invisibly outside it, the layout is crap and has to be rejected. Move fast, break things, rewrite "rules" you don't even dimly comprehend. (And then the victims will go blame everyone else for getting them into that fix, since super-tech-bros don't make mistakes.)

(Just like, say, deciding to get into the carmaking game and starting by throwing out a century of infinitely-refined engineering art, just because you're so much smarter than the hundred thousand who spent their lives at it before you graced the world with your presence. But we were talking about typography.)

So between forty-odd years of work by a company whose field is a venerable art and whose middle name is Typography, and one that's spent thirty years inventing corners to cut in the name of profit (often using questionable/detrimental tech to do it)... I have no problem assigning blame here. But feel free to disagree.

[positive_build0D4C]

Again, I'm not arguing that the Amazon bots are not overzealous. Clearly, they are. But art is about choices. Maybe some people don't want their serifs to stick out. Maybe some people have reason why they don't want it to happen. In this case, I love my elegant classic serifed fonts, and I certainly don't care whether they stick out or not. But in this case I don't want it to happen, not for artistic reasons, but because I want my effing book to get published. But if it truly is about the artistry as you claim, then surely artists have broken the rules more than anyone else. That's how they make something new and challenging. They don't do that by sticking to the accepted rules of centuries.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All you have to do is move your (tight) margins in so that the content is within KDP's (literal) guidelines. Your serifs can hang out like flags, if you like, as long as they are inside those margins.

I can't see this as a great esthetic debate. 🙂

[rob day]

Maybe some people don't want their serifs to stick out.

All of this relates to InDesign’s OMA feature—if you turn it off, the punctuation will not hang outside of the text frame. You could file a bug report or feature request, but there is little chance Adobe will alter an important typographic feature like OMA because of a printer’s quirky preflight requirements.

[rob day]

Also, as James suggests it looks like with OMA turned off typefaces with characters that have negative side bearings can still fall outside of the text frame—this seems to be font dependent and not an InDesign function.

Here with OMA turned on the puctuation hangs as expected:

With it turned off the lowercase f of Jensen and Garamond still hang (because of a negative right side bearing?), but Vista Sans and Dalliance f do not—the alignment is font specific:

[rob day]

Adobe Indesign allowing no user control over something make sense either

Hi @positive_build0D4C , In case you missed my post(s) in the other thread, Text Frame Options allows you to set any Inset Spacing. The text alignment is optical, so an inset would let you keep an optical alignment and keep the glyphs inside of the frame.

[positive_build0D4C]

I appreciate the suggestion. I did consider this, but the problem is that it would require modifying every single text box in a huge book. I imagine I could write a macro or something, but instead I've gone ahead and already added .04" to the margins, which didn't require a macro, and then I reset the entire layout. It took another 3 days essentially, but I did it. I've already ordered a test print from Amazon KDP. It should arrive today. So, that's exciting!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There are many approaches to mass fixes like this in ID, starting with changes to Parent pages and going on to Object Styles. Having to go through a document and manually change dozens or hundreds of objects is not normally needed, can be avoided with some careful choices in initial layout, and can be fixed with some fairly simple cleanup and organizing.

If you use/d ID at a very basic level, laying things out page by page without using any of the more advanced layout management, then yes, it can be tedious to move forward from there. But it's a good practice for any future books and a cleanup pass shouldn't take more than a day's work even if you're new to the processes.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@positive_build0D4C

From the screenshot in your other post - you need to narrow it by 1mm-2mm?

Printing it at 98% should fix the problem... And no one will notice... 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@positive_build0D4C

You could export your document as PDF - then import it back, with say 95-98% scale. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Pretty messy. Not necessarily desirable to reduce all content size and then try to juggle the overall margin/page size.

If the inner margin isn't at least an inch, the pages will have to be recomposed. No good or simple workaround.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

The other solution would be to print centered and / or shifted on a slightly bigger page size. 

Just to save the bacon... 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There are probably any number of fixes that would get the project to the goal line.

None of them are doing things right, though, and I don't believe in compromising on books. If the layout is faulty, it needs to be redone. Entirely OP's call, though. Not my malpys and all that. 🙂

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@James Gifford—NitroPress

Yeah, you are right. 

It would speed things up to first anchor all graphics to the main Story - so any reflow would be much more manageable. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Just for any future reference, this post is confusing a couple of different book layout terms. What KDP refers to as "the gutter" is what most publishers and designers would simply call "the inside margin." This misuse comes, probably, from Word, which has a completely confusing double definition of "the inside margin" and a separately settable value called "the gutter" — which is almost/kinda accurate. In absolutely strict terms, the inside margin is the space between the text and other live content and the inner edge of the sheet/page. The "gutter" is a variable amount that is lost to reader view from the bound edge to the point where text etc. can be clearly read. Designers set the inner margin; the gutter is mostly determined by the binding process. But, probably courtesty of MS-speak, KDP has blurred and confused the two so that even somewhat experienced designers have no freakin' idea what they're talking about.

And, of course, the "gutter" on the above menu refers to the space between columns and has nothing to do with margins — which again is completely correct, but somewhat antiquated usage.

Back to 2024, now.