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KB0115: Why do italics not show up in my ebooks?

See also:
How to improve document formatting
Why do paragraph styles include direct character formatting?

If italics, bold or other formatting doesn't show up in your Epub or Kindle book, it could be that you are using a special font such as "Times New Roman Bold Italic". This kind of font is unlikely to exist in the ereader, even if it displays fine within Jutoh. Instead, use a standard font such as "Times New Roman", and apply italic and bold separately.

If you find that formatting is missing when applied to whole paragraphs, but not when applied to part of a paragraph, the cause is probably the way that your word processor stored the formatting before the file was imported into Jutoh. Some word processors, such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice, optimize formatting so that if you apply formatting to the whole paragraph, the formatting is merged with the paragraph style instead of being applied as separate character formatting. So when you then apply a different paragraph style, the original character formatting is lost. Although Jutoh 2.85 and above avoid this problem, you can fix the styles in an existing project with the Format | Book | Formatting Cleanup command, as described here.

Here's a tip from Lia Rees: in LibreOffice, save the file as HTML. It will add bold and italics tags in all the right places. Import that into Jutoh and the character styles will be preserved, even if you replace paragraph styles.

If that doesn't solve it, the culprit may be redundant direct formatting that triggers an ereader bug. Try simplifying your formatting; keep the Formatting Palette open (with the Styles tab selected) and look at what formatting there is. You may well have a lot of automatic styles (containing '+' characters). Wherever possible, eliminate these by using named paragraph styles. Also, run the Formatting Cleanup dialog (on the Format | Book menu) and remove all redundant text colour, text size and font name formatting. Instead of applying character formatting to a whole paragraph, create a new paragraph style with that formatting and apply it.

Eventually, your formatting should be sufficiently simplified that where you have italics, Jutoh only has to emit the <i>...</i> tags, and this may work around any bugs in ereaders that is stopping the formatting from working.


Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0114: Do I really need two covers when submitting a Kindle book? | Next: KB0116: Why do font and style controls go crazy on Mac OS X?