Notes on ebooks, formats, and beautiful typesetting
Practical guides for authors and readers — how formats work, how to fix broken files, and how to make every book a pleasure to read.
Reflowable or fixed? Open or locked to one store? A plain-language tour of the three formats every author runs into — and a simple rule for choosing.
EPUB images not showing after conversion almost always means a broken manifest link, not a lost picture. Here's the mechanism, and how to find the break.
EPUB table of contents problems — stray bullets, a wrong order, missing chapters — happen when the navigation file drifts from the spine. Here's the fix.
EPUB compatibility problems usually mean one reader enforces rules another ignores. Here's why the same file breaks in one app, and how to find the fault.
The best format to convert to EPUB is whichever carries structure most cleanly. How Word, HTML and Markdown each map to an ebook, and which to pick.
EPUB validation errors explained: what epubcheck codes like RSC-005, OPF-014 and PKG-006 actually mean, and the fix each one is pointing you toward.
EPUB embedded fonts not working after you send it to Kindle? Amazon's converter and the reader's own font setting both override them — here is what to check.
An EPUB cover not showing after sideloading usually means the image is in the file but not marked in the manifest. Here's why Calibre hides it, and the fix.
Calibre EPUB conversion problems — stray italics, underlines and odd spacing after a Word import — come from the source file, not the converter.
PDF to EPUB formatting problems — broken paragraphs, headers stranded in the text, one long chapter — come from how PDFs store words. Here is the fix.