As I mentioned in my last post, there are a few assorted quirks in KF8 that I've employed to my advantage as best I could, including:
1. No Orientation Lock - you can view the content in either portrait or landscape mode, although portrait orientation is the intended layout for full page view. As you can see, I've added decorative borders to the top and bottom of the pages to fill up the Kindle Fire's slightly taller 7" display. The Fire does not feature two-page layout view in landscape as the iPad does, and its widescreen aspect ratio would not adequately accommodate it anyway. This makes individual pages render rather small in landscape mode. However...
2. Image Zoom - you can double-tap the background art to view it without text overlays, and then use pinch-and-zoom to scale the image to a larger size. The actual resolution of the embedded images is 1024x1748 at the highest quality setting I could get within the 800kb per image limit (generally either 9 or 10 out of 12 in Photoshop). Hopefully with the upcoming Kindle 10" Tablet this limit will be removed (or further increased) and I can insert even higher quality images. The speculated larger screen size Kindle is one of the primary reasons I've been adamant about including the highest resolution art that is allowed. This makes the file size rather large, at 24Mb for just this first chapter. The complete finished work should come in at around 150 megabytes or so. And that's just for the first book out of four.
3. Region Magnification - you can double-tap on text to increase it by 150% and read it formatted in standard text blocks rather than wrapped around the background images. Swipe left or right to move from one text box to the next, or double-tap to dismiss and return to full page view. I have not used the comics-mode Panel Zoom feature to enlarge areas of the art because there are no individual panels here to zoom, and the full image background zoom works better for this project.
I've tried to make the wrapped text as legible as possible, with obvious paragraph indents and a background glow layer behind the text to make it stand out. But this has been something of a compromise at times, so let me know if there's anyplace where the text is just too cumbersome and difficult to read and I'll see what I can do to amend it. It's been a bit of a learning curve, and you should find it becomes easier to read as this section progresses, since I've learned to avoid really complex wrapping such as that found on pages 3-4, which was a major pain to layout.
A NOTE ON THE FORMAT:
This is the KF8 edition for the Kindle Fire only. KF8 has not yet been rolled out for the Kindle apps or other device models, so it will only work correctly on the Fire itself. As Amazon rolls out KF8 further I'll test it and make the necessary adjustments, but for now this version is intended to be viewed only on the Kindle Fire device.
Nice work. Stunning illustrations! The only issue I found is the book shows up in documents instead of books on my Kindle Fire. Perhaps you need to add the EBOK tag?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliment Dan. It's much appreciated, and I'm pleased to hear you like it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the EBOK tag, this is something I've been meaning to look into when I find the time. So far as I know there is no way to change the PDOC to EBOK without converting the file in Calibre, and this is not possible with KF8 fixed layout, as Calibre does not handle that format (it now handles standard KF8, but not fixed layouts).
I've heard that there's a Java program out there that allows you to edit the personal doc tag without conversion, but I haven't looked into it yet. I haven't thought about it too seriously in part because Amazon's own KF8 FL samples show up in under documents, so I figured that might just be where they'll all show up. But then I realized the KF8 graphic novels I bought were in the books tab, so I know it can be done.
Have you had any success with this?