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KB0321: Why is Kindle Previewer not showing my book with enhanced typesetting?

See also:
How can I preview enhanced typesetting for Kindle files?
Some Kindle tables render poorly in Kindle Previewer 3

When launching a Kindle book in Kindle Previewer 3, the book will normally be shown with enhanced typesetting, which improves aspects such as fonts, colours, and margins.

In KP3, you should see thumbnails for the book and Enhanced typesetting in the left-hand panel. If you don't see thumbnails or Enhanced typesetting, KP3 failed to convert the book for enhanced typesetting.

This could be because (1) KP3 is not running correctly (see a possible fix below), or (2) that Jutoh is generating incompatible code due to something in the project content. The latter seems no longer to be an issue, although we list problems that have occurred in the past below in (2).

1. A component of KP3 is not running correctly

On Windows 10, some customers are seeing errors running KP3, including this Windows error message:

KindleImageProcessor.exe - Application Error
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b). Click OK to close the application.

A tip in KP3 shows:

This book has errors preventing it from being enabled for Enhanced Typesetting. Go to View -> Conversion log to view the log file.

The log file consists of the following, but with no actual warnings or errors showing:

"Error – these errors will block the book from ingestion."
"Warning – these warnings may block the book from ingestion so we recommend fixing"
"ET Errors – these errors will cause the book to not have Enhanced typesetting enabled."
"ET Warnings – these warnings are caused when we ignore a style or construct which is not supported in Enhanced typesetting."

"Type","Description","Source File","Line Number","Recommended Fix"

It seems that something on the computer is blocking the component KindleImageProcessor.exe. This thread discusses the problem:

www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=272407&page=59

The two suggestions in the thread are:

  1. It could be due to anti-virus software blocking the executable, so you could try disabling it temporarily and trying again.

  2. Installing VC++ runtimes (probably for VC++ 12) that might somehow have been uninstalled. A customer has reported that installing the VC++ runtimes for VC++ 2010, 2012 and 2013 did fix the problem. You can read more about installing runtimes at www.howtogeek.com/256245/why-are-there-so-many-microsoft-visual-c-redistributables-installed-on-my-pc/.

You could also try a Windows 10 reboot in case KP3 hasn't fully installed.

Another thought is that if AV software (or Windows 10) is blocking a particular folder, you could try installing it in a different folder if it lets you, e.g. under c:\KindlePreviewer3. Sometimes this helps if a program won't run. You would then need to edit the KP3 helper within Jutoh to make "Launch" work with KP3 again, but you can always test whether KP3 works without doing that, by running KP3 and opening the .mobi file manually from KP3.

Note that when you upload your file to KDP, it will apply enhanced typesetting anyway because that happens on Amazon's servers. The .mobi (or .epub) file you upload is not affected by KP3's failure to run.

2. Problems with the project

At the time of writing - April, 2020 - Amazon have changed enhanced typesetting so the following issues do not switch off enhanced typesetting. However, they are included for historical interest.

Known reasons for this failure are as follows:

  1. A table has CSS that includes display: inline-block;. To avoid this, edit your Kindle configuration and set Maximum table rows for inline-block to 0 (zero). This suppresses an optimization that can help with table centring for some viewers, but is not necessary for Kindle. From Jutoh 2.75, your Kindle configurations will never use display: inline-block; for tables, but if you are using Epub configurations to create Kindle files, you will still need to set this option to zero.

  2. There are nested tables.

  3. A table is inside an inline-block text box. Set Maximum box words for inline-block to 0 to ensure text boxes are not marked as inline-block. From Jutoh 2.92, a table within a box is detected and inline-block is not emitted.

  4. The Language field in the project's Metadata is set to a value that KP3 doesn't like. It's not known what languages are suitable besides English.

  5. There are more than 25 SVG (vector) images in the book.

  6. If we find other causes for enhanced typesetting failure, we will add them here.


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