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I am publishing an HTML page (a book) to Kindle using kdp.amazon.com and I encountered an encoding problem so I added:

lang="en"

to:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd" lang="en">

and 

charset="utf-8"

to 

<meta charset="utf-8"/>

But I am still having the same problem with characters like ' or |. Please see the image attached below.

apostrophe displaying incorrectly

(should be it's)

elixenide
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4m1nh4j1
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    What do you use to edit the file? Some editors (most notably on Windows and OSX just mangle quotes and other special characters into some (arbitrarily slightly nicer looking) unicode codepoint. – Anthon Apr 26 '16 at 11:13
  • Are you testing this using the Kindle reader software? I thought those were pretty common ASCII characters so most fonts should support them. Which font are you using to test this on the ereader software?And are you sure you're using a low-ASCII single quote, and not some extended ASCII single quote? Those are different characters. What's the ASCII decimal value of both of those characters you are having problems with? – Bulrush Apr 27 '16 at 15:40
  • Is the image a screenshot from a reader or your editor? – Nathan Osman Jun 28 '16 at 15:39

2 Answers2

2

Most likely your source files aren't properly encoded. It's not sufficient to add utf-8 charset declarations, you'll need to actually save your source files as utf-8 files. (If you happen to use the old Mobipocket Creator, you'll also need to save all HTML files with a BOM (byte-order mark).

If your source file is an ePub, open and save it with Calibre Editor or Sigil. This'll re-save them with the proper encoding.

If you hand-crafted your book, open all HTML files with Notepad++, change the encoding to utf-8 and re-save them.

1

I don't have the answer to your question. But here's a very helpful resource which lets you test all kinds of characters and if necessary substitute unicode characters

http://freekindlebooks.org/Unicode/unicode.html

Two related articles: https://timctaylor.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/kindle-support-for-unicode-pt1-dispelling-a-myth/ and https://timctaylor.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/kindle-support-for-unicode-pt2-how-to-use-unicode/

I'm guessing that these errors are vestiges of a conversion mistake. (Maybe you pasted it from another web page or a word processed doc). If you use a text editor, you can highlight the character giving you problems, do a global replace with whatever you can type in your text editor. Both characters may look the same in your text editor, but they may in fact be different characters when rendered in a kindle. (Occasionally these rendering mistakes may even look fine in a web browser -- verify in Firefox (View -> Text Encoding to switch encoding). Hope this helps.

idiotprogrammer
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