KDP cutting off the top of an an image that is formatted fine in Writer (possibly related to a Table appearing with a padding even though I set it to 0, which is another issue)

English
#1

I’m formatting a book for Kindle Direct Publishing, and encountering an image cutoff issue. I’ve been through numerous iterations of edits I’ve reviewed in Preview, and this one has only recently appeared.

Here is what I have created in Writer:

but here is what appears in KDP:

I chatted with KDP support and they pointed out the problem is in the manuscript. Lo and behold, it is. In a commend below (I can’t share more than two links yet) is a screenshot of a PDF export (this was taken after I manually moved the image even further down than is shown in the other two screenshots)…

Can anyone advise on this please?

#3

Can you attach the document (at least the page before, the problematic page and the page after: 3 pages total) ? This is necessary to analyse what is at stake (and have an idea about your formatting).

#4

I suppose so. It’s for an as-yet unpublished book, but I suppose that if side effect would happen, it would be publicity/visibility.

Here are those 3 pages:

16to18.odt (85.2 KB)

#5

The image in the document is here:

xo_cropped.pdf (58.0 KB)

#6

Does it mean you insert it from an external document? I get a white “rectangle” in the .odt instead of the image. I can’t then tell if your problem originates from scaling and cropping inside Writer or if the rectangle is the original size.

Regarding your formatting, everything is done manually: you only use Default Paragraph Style (except in tables) with direct formatting. You use indifferently line breaks and paragraph breaks with the result that your paragraph structure is not consistent. Vertical spacing is done with empty paragraphs. You could have done the same with a mechanical typewriter.

The image rectangle position has been adjusted manually with the mouse which could cause bad unexpected interaction with text.

I opened your PDF image file and I experience a weird display: all the zodiacal symbols are replaced by unexpected letters, as if the font was not embedded in the PDF (I checked there are a few embedded glyphs). I suspect your drawing is quite old and using some Window$ 256-character legacy font predating Unicode. These font are usually indistinctly “converted” to Unicode by moving characters in 0x80-0xff range to the Private User Area PUA starting at U+E000. This could explain why I get accented letters or general symbols which come from U+00A0-U+00FF.

Writer has no factory filter to insert PDF as images. You should convert it first to JPEG, PNG or other supported format.

PS: OS name? LO version?

#7

Thanks for your elaborate response. All of the things you notice have very good reasons for being that way.

Regarding the image:

I attached it so you could possibly see it present in the document. The rectangle is the original size as it was inserted.

And, it is not old. It’s made with an industry standard program this month. The image is exported from that program to PDF, then inserted into the document. I tried exporting it with JPG, and that resulted in unreadable resolution. Others who have published in my field use the export to PDF process as well. Anyway, I tried what you suggested (JPG) originally, and it resulted in days of troubleshooting and solving.

You say there’s no “factory filter.” I don’t understand what that means. Anyway, it is as easy as a single click to choose a PDF after “Insert Image.” If the program didn’t allow for it, it wouldn’t be allowed.

You are commenting on the zodiac symbols in my table, but that is irrelevant. You don’t have the font, but that doesn’t matter, because the manuscript is in pdf. You are only seeing it because you asked for flanking pages. All of this can be disregarded for my inquiry.

Yes, everything is formatted manually. Everything has to fit just so perfectly on the pages, and that’s the only way I could get it to happen. Means to an end, and also irrelevant to the problem that only exists in a very tiny portion of the document.

Windows 10 Pro 22H2. LO 24.2.5.2

#8

In this case, your document is page-oriented (a page is a “significant” unit) and not "flow-riented (pages don’t matter, they are allocated on demand to host the text). Writer if “flow-oriented” where pages are only a quantization of the whole text to cope with traditional “discrete” media (limited sheet size).

Your preferred tool is then a Desktop Publishing (DTP) program like Scribus (free and libre) or Quark XPress, Adobe InDesign, … (commercial products). You can simulate DTP to a limited extent with Writer but this is a lot of work and you are vulnerable to edits, even minor.

#9

Oh. Well, I’m glad I know this two weeks before publication and not two days, then. :sweat_smile:

#10

though quite honestly after download Scribus and taking a look at what is involved with switching everything over (including learning a whole new program from nothing), wow, how daunting, and I would much rather just solve this minor problem in Libre. The book has to be submitted in 2 weeks or it could be months before I have another opportunity. I wonder if there is a way to accomplish this in Libre at all.

#2

Here is the third photo:

#11

Update to responders and others:

Although I don’t know what caused the problem, I was able to find a solution by bringing the PDF into InkScape and exporting as a PNG, then inserting it into Scribus, which I am now using due to @ajlittoz 's suggestion.

#12

Hello I’m having this same problem - only during PDF export am I seeing the top of an Image cutoff, but it looks ok in LO-Writer.

From what you said above, I suspected the Image I’d inserted had an issue. I had exported this image as PDF from LO-Impress, and then cropped it - that appeared to be problem. As you may know, when you crop a PDF, the “pixels” are not removed, instead the crop-window is just added to the doc.
I eventually figured out how to export the image from PDF → JPG (or any raster image, PNG etc) at high res (needed PDF-XCHange to choose 1200dpi export settings), and now the image is displayed correctly after LO-Writer exports the PDF.

I suspect Libre Office Writer has a bug related to: (a) a PDF inserted into the ODF doc, that has a Crop applied to it, will (b) display correctly in LOW, but (c) when exported to PDF the inserted PDF’s crop is mistakenly re-applied or something similar.
Workaround is to replace the inserted PDF with a raster/bitmap “Image”, eg. JPG or PNG format.

I suspect when you exported → PNG you had solved the problem, it was likley not necessary to switch to Scribus as well (at least not to solve just this issue).

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