Mobipocket problem?

[Jo]

For some strange reason Mobipocket is now changing my apostrophes and speech marks to strange characters after conversion, it's only started happening in the last few weeks - other books already converted look fine.

Does anyone know what's causing this and how I can fix it? I haven't changed anything that could cause the problem.

I have tried importing Word doc and html, just about to change to plain quotes rather than curly to see if that works.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received. Just to say, the books I am trying to convert I have formatted in Word, reformatting in html (which I am sure would fix it) isn't possible, just don't have the time right now.

Thanks!

[Jo]

Ok, the straight quotes worked, but found some other things Mobipocket isn't liking which is pretty baffling!

The em dash is showing a a capital D with a line through it, and ... is showing as an E with an accent over it, completely confused why it's doing this now and not before.

[JW]

The problem is with the UTF-8 coding. Mobipocket might have had an update (haven't used it in a while) to bring it into compliance with KF8 and Mobi7. In which case, it's not recognizing some of the characters that Word is using.

Whatever you do, don't use straight quotes. You could end up with unwanted page breaks, font changes and interference with the user interface.

[JW]

I just tried to get into the MobiPocket site. Got a File Server Not Found message. I wonder if the program has been deadlined.

[JW]

Jo, I just ran a Word file through MobiPocket. It converted fine with no misreading the ASCII characters. Of course, my version is several years old and I have no idea when was the last time it was updated, if ever.

Go to your character panel in Word and check to see what type of characters your document is using. See if setting it to Normal Characters helps.

[Ian]

This is probably not connected to your problem but I sometimes get conversion errors if I haven't accepted all changes (when using Track Changes) in the original Word doc.

[Jo]

Thanks JW, I am just going to give your ideas a go... Mobipocket hasn't been updated for some time, it's just strange it only started a few weeks ago.

I don't use track changes Ian, but I'll keep an eye out for that. :)

[Jo]

Well after all that I think the reason it was happening was because my client had messed with the document I sent him, altering typo's etc... so something wasn't right. I ended up altering the html file and converting it from that and it worked ok.

I have just converted two more files and they worked fine! :)