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Anyone Have Experience doing the Coding for Inclusion of a Map for the Kindle?

maraichmaraich Posts: 492
edited December 1969 in The Commons

I know this is an oddball question - specific beyond belief, actually. But I'm getting a wee bit frustrated, so I'm hoping someone else has tackled this issue and can help.

I've been formatting my book for the Kindle, hand coding it so I can get it right. I've uploaded it so that I can see how it displays on the various flavors of Kindle and nearly everything looks great. The drop caps look good, the graphics for the chapter entries display well, and the scene split images are all perfect. Everything is wonderful except my map.

On the older Kindles the image of the map looks okay, but on the newer Kindles (Fire on up) it displays very small and you have to click on it to get it to get larger. I looked over Amazon's instructions and they say that if you do you image in a 9x11 format that the Kindles will automatically scale the image to fill the screen. Tried that and if anything it looks worse because all the Kindles are long and the 9x11 setup is too squatty and the image is still shown on the screen very small.

Any ideas in terms of CSS I could try? Right now I have it set up as a centered image and that's it (I've also tried setting it up from the left and that didn't help). I haven't tried any kind of sizing... I could try CSS dimension properties if folks think that's viable.

Comments

  • CypherFOXCypherFOX Posts: 3,401
    edited December 1969

    Greetings,
    So I know absolutely ZIP about Kindles, but I do know a bit about web development, and you mentioned CSS. Have you tried using media queries? They might be ignored on older devices, but the newer devices (especially the Kindle Fire) should definitely support them, and for those you should be able to specify EXACTLY the image you want based on the resolution or other features of the device.

    -- Morgan

  • maraichmaraich Posts: 492
    edited December 1969

    Hmmm, that's a thought. I use media queries to get the drop caps to display right on the newer Kindles and then have just an enlarged first letter on the older Kindles. I'll look into your suggestion and see if I can get that to work. Thanks!

  • TheWheelManTheWheelMan Posts: 1,014
    edited December 1969

    maraich said:
    I know this is an oddball question - specific beyond belief, actually. But I'm getting a wee bit frustrated, so I'm hoping someone else has tackled this issue and can help.

    I've been formatting my book for the Kindle, hand coding it so I can get it right. I've uploaded it so that I can see how it displays on the various flavors of Kindle and nearly everything looks great. The drop caps look good, the graphics for the chapter entries display well, and the scene split images are all perfect. Everything is wonderful except my map.

    On the older Kindles the image of the map looks okay, but on the newer Kindles (Fire on up) it displays very small and you have to click on it to get it to get larger. I looked over Amazon's instructions and they say that if you do you image in a 9x11 format that the Kindles will automatically scale the image to fill the screen. Tried that and if anything it looks worse because all the Kindles are long and the 9x11 setup is too squatty and the image is still shown on the screen very small.

    Any ideas in terms of CSS I could try? Right now I have it set up as a centered image and that's it (I've also tried setting it up from the left and that didn't help). I haven't tried any kind of sizing... I could try CSS dimension properties if folks think that's viable.

    I've run into that problem too, and what I'm unsure of is whether or not the image display on the Kindle Previewer is accurate. I think it is, however. By the way, the 9 x 11 thing is specifically for the older Kindles, which had squarer screens. The newer Kindles, particularly the Fire, has more of a 9 X 16 aspect ratio.

  • icprncssicprncss Posts: 3,694
    edited December 1969

    Is the map an end paper, in the forward, afterward or part of the body?

    What format is your original manuscript in (doc, pdf, rtf, ect)?

    One way to add illustrations to the body of the text is to insert them in the original and then convert to mobi using Calibre.

    http://calibre-ebook.com/

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