This is very interesting to me.  I have tried for two  projects to generate
indexes that would work on Kindle. The indexterm content had both a primary
and secondary level. Everything would look good in epubs on epub reading
systems(and be valid, etc), but in mobipocket it would render
inconsistently the elements in the index -- sometimes indenting, sometimes
putting them on the same line. It was a mess. Even though it rendered fine
in Kindle Previewer on all simulated devices, the dl, dt, dd just scrambled
everything on Kindle app for android as well as on e-ink Paperwhites.

I spent a  lot of time trying to troubleshoot (and the details were fuzzy),
but concluded that the problem lay not with docbook but with kindlegen (or
maybe the css support on kindle reading systems). It's frustrating because
having a good multilevel index is standard on many nonfiction ebooks.

On the other hand, when looking at Bob's POWER SHIFT ebook (which came out
a few years ago), the index rendered fine on Kindle. - although in that
ebook, it used page numbers for an ebook.

(In my projects, I used   <xsl:param name="index.prefer.titleabbrev"
select="1"></xsl:param> and   <xsl:param name="index.links.to.section"
select="0"></xsl:param> )
(I could provide an ebook example if you need)

BTW, never got around to saying it, but Bob I enjoyed Power Shift ebook

Robert Nagle






From: Richard Hamilton <hamil...@xmlpress.net>
To: Lars Vogel <lars.vo...@gmail.com>
Cc: Jason Zech <z...@loyolapress.com>, DocBook Apps <
docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Bcc:
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 18:42:50 -0700
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Converting Docbook epub to Kindle shows warnings
Hi Lars,

I know this is from a long time ago, but I just ran into the same problem
with a file that nests variable lists using the list-presentation=“blocks”
processing instruction.

In that case, the XHTML5 (this is with 1.79.2, building an epub3) is valid,
but kindlegen doesn’t like the nesting. It closes off the highest level
<dl> and <dd> elements and flags some <dt> elements as being invalid.

The result doesn’t lose any content, but it removes the nesting and
flattens everything to one level.

As with your case, the epub is valid and when displayed, the nesting is
fine.

At this point, I’m convinced that the problem is in kindlegen. I just used
the Kindle previewer, which wasn’t available in 2012, and it created a
.mobi file that preserves the nesting (at least on the devices I tried in
the previewer).

Anyway, this is probably way to late to help, but I figured I’d add it to
the thread in case someone runs into it in the future, since it is still a
problem using kindlegen.

Best regards,
Dick Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
hamil...@xmlpress.net

-- 
Robert Nagle
5115 Sandyfields Ln Katy, TX 77494
(Cell) 832-251-7522

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