Friday, November 23, 2012

Chapter 8 Adding Images

Adding images is for sure the most little understood aspect of Kindle formatting, and that is understandable as the new Kindle Guide bows to those who INSIST on doing so directly in Word, as opposed to the earlier Guide which gave the correct manner via the img src=... tag in html file [exactly as one does for a web page].

So here is a REPEAT of the correct way, avoiding all those ppi and dpi Blues.

 Chapter 8

Images

We now turn our attention to any changes in The Bible on Word to Kindle - Book 2 and as for Book 1 most of the advice is still current, especially the advice to simply use a “placemarker” in Word and insert the standard code into the resultant html file.

However, as seen above, tags such as <center> no longer work, so we need to once again build a New Style to house our placemarker.
Here is a screen shot of such a Style called “image”.

And here is a screen shot of how this would look in Word.


And a screen shot from NotePad++ to show the highlighted text that has been changed from “Image..” in the html file.



In this case we want a page break before every image, so same as for Heading 1 we have built it into the Style itself. Obviously that may not always be the case (eg with photos) so you might make 2 different Styles for images – one with a page break and one without.

The reason in this case is the images are all gifs and are cropped to an exact width in order to show the detail in screen shots from Word. The problem is that Kindle can do some “clever acts” via scaling, and one is highlighted in our blogspot at Amazon Kindle has Unbelievable Tekkers.

Hopefully that issue can be controlled by using a page break before each image, but remember Amazon is continually “changing the rules” on how the final product is rendered from device to device, but rarely tells us, so always check your final product on ALL devices, as described below.

As an aside, it is often inferred that Kindle for PC is not a “real” device and therefore it matters not how a book might be rendered on Kindle for PC (affectionately known as KFC) and in fact the “9 Shades of Scaling” reported in the blog above does not happen on a “normal” Kindle.

But the user statistics say that 50% of all reading of Kindle Books IS on KFC. Then one needs to understand that KFC has always been in color and has always been able to link to a website (eg Utube). It would seem that the proof of this aspect is that there is no such thing as “Fire for PC”.

An unfortunate consequence of all this is that in such a case as this book where we use a page break before all the screen shot images to ensure they are not scaled, THAT is rendered on some Kindle devices as being a DOUBLE page break, hence a blank page.

But there is really no issue because the ONLY logical way to use this book is ON a PC, with the book in one Window on KFC and Word open in another Window to actually execute the steps in the book. One would not normally be reading this book as a bedtime story at a ski resort.

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