• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

Kindle Previewer and Indesign

Participant ,
Oct 08, 2020 Oct 08, 2020

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

 I've been trying to preview a fixed layout epub on Kindle Previewer but it keeps failing. I am now running out of time.

 

I've validated it and it passed. I did Flightcheck and it told me there was a problem with ligatures so I got rid of them. I also changed fonts as they seemed to be clashing. I've changed the tables to png files and nothing seems to work. I've tried to DeBug it on Calibre but its been stuck on 47% for almost 2 hours. Nothing helps.

 

The message I'm getting is:

'Kindle conversion has encountered an internal error while enabling Enhanced Typesetting on this book.'

 

It has illustrator files and tables in it.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

TOPICS
EPUB

Views

7.0K

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines

correct answers 2 Correct answers

Community Expert , Oct 08, 2020 Oct 08, 2020

»It has illustrator files and tables in it.«

……it looks like you did all the steps to fix the problem. Also checked back with Kindle support?

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202087570

 

Votes

Translate

Translate
Community Expert , Oct 09, 2020 Oct 09, 2020

If you are on a Mac, have a look at CicularFLO: 

https://www.circularflo.com

Votes

Translate

Translate
Community Expert ,
Oct 08, 2020 Oct 08, 2020

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

»It has illustrator files and tables in it.«

……it looks like you did all the steps to fix the problem. Also checked back with Kindle support?

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202087570

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Joely:  I may very well check in with Kindle Support. Thanks for the tip.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Kindle has support? 😛

 

Joe, note that the origin of this thread is some three years back. Not everyone is still participating. 


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Oct 09, 2020 Oct 09, 2020

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

If you are on a Mac, have a look at CicularFLO: 

https://www.circularflo.com

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Dec 07, 2022 Dec 07, 2022

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

After much trial and error, I found that for my titles, this came up when there were multiple languages listed in the content.opf metadata. Choosing a single language allowed Kindle Previewer to move forward.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Apr 19, 2023 Apr 19, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

This is a great solution that worked for me. It would be great if this could be sorted from within InDesign rather than having to edit the code. But it works!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Are multiple languages actually used in the document, or is it an artifact of legacy styles? If the latter, the solution - to me - is to update those styles and remove the extraneous style info. 

 

With the real solution being, of course, not using the FXL format any more, except for graphical books where it's the only EPUB option. 🙂


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

James:  Thank you. I was trying a Fixed Layout format as another option and a troubleshooting step. I have no hyperlinks or anything else in my book that would seem to warrant the Reflowable option that most users appear to recommend (based on my naive newbie experience). Unfortunately, I can't assess the results of the Fixed Layout option since I keep getting this error message from Kindle Previewer 3: "Kindle conversion has encountered an internal error while enabling Enhanced Typesetting on this book.". Do you have any ideas that would make the Fixed Layout option work? BTW, I'm only using English-US as a language preference.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

If you don't need fixed layout, as for graphic novels, children's books and other "art page" books, don't use it. It's a largely obsolete option and very difficult to work with. It either works perfectly, or is a nightmare to fix up. 

 

That said, there should not be multiple language entries in its structure unless they are in the InDesign document itself. This is a style-by-style setting. Go through your paragraph and character styles and make sure all are set to a default of US English.

 

This is how EPUB and Kindle problems are fixed in the modern scheme: at the creation level, not by fixing the output. 


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I'm new to InDesign. How did you edit "content.opf metadata"?

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

If you're on a Mac try BBEdit.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Derek:  Thank you, but I'm on an HP using Windows. I just performed a search of my entire computer and did not find a file called "content.opf". In addition, I checked all of my language preferences and they're all English-US. I'm getting the exact same error message as you did from Kindle Previewer 3.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

This is a file inside the EPUB itself (EPUBs are actually ZIP archives of files that resemble a web site). Opening them and editing content files is... complicated and should be avoided except as a final solution to problems that can't be solved any other way.

 

(It used to be standard practice but ID and other tools have made it largely unnecessary.)


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

James:  Thank you. I will avoid it then.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Reflowable has its own issues but is in all ways the "correct" model for e-books. It's worth understanding and mastering.

 

Two guidelines: always make sure information you look up is current; the net is loaded with very outdated info that is not readily identifiable as such. If it's more than two to three years old, it may be wildly wrong or misleading. 

 

And if a process includes editing exported EPUBs, it stems from an older, largely outdated approach; you should probably move on. 


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

James:  Got it. Thanks. I just went through all of my book's individual documents and checked for the language settings. All of the paragraph styles were set to "English: USA". This was not the case for the character styles; they were all unselected (no language set). I've since changed them all to "English: USA". The same error message from Kindle Previewer 3 resulted for the Fixed Layout option. I will stick to the Reflowable option as you suggested.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Reflowable ePub is the format for text heavy books such as novels. The format is not intuitive to produce so anything more complex needs an understanding of HTML and CSS to fine tune the document.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Derek:  Thank you. Unfortunately, I don't know the details of HTML or CSS.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

James:  Upon using the Reflowable option, I received EPUB error messages for some (not all) book chapters: "Page anchor is missing." Do you know what this means? I removed the Contents file from my eBook book file in case that matters. (I have a Contents file for my print book and everything seems to work fine there.)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Have you anchored the images?

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Derek:  I'm finishing that up now. However, some more research on my part seems to indicate that page anchoring has to do with my book's index and indexing of page ranges. Additionally, the page anchoring doesn't appear to stop Kindle Previewer 3 from displaying the book. I think I just have to fix some things as you alluded to. Thanks.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Participant ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I have actually learned a huge amount since my initial post and I think the page anchor is probably to do with hyperlinks or possibly your TOC. It's basically not finding the link to the page so you'll need to check they all work. 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Irama:  Some more research on my part seems to indicate that page anchoring has to do with my nonfiction book's index and indexing of page ranges. Additionally, the page anchoring doesn't appear to stop Kindle Previewer 3 from displaying the book. I think I just have to fix some things. Thanks.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Apr 24, 2023 Apr 24, 2023

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Export to EPUB requires absolutely meticulous document setup, especially in styles. Things you can get away with in print will fail, or worse, in EPUB export. Fixed layout will sometimes skip over structural and format issues, but reflowable, never. 

 

The three fundamentals are to have all content in one text flow, all images anchored within that flow, and to have absolutely meticulous application of styles, with no default or override styling. That is all essential to proper use of ID for any purpose, but it's required for e-book work.


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines