I recently updated a file which had previously been approved for the Premier Catalog at Smashwords, and they said that some characters in the replacement file came out as question marks. I downloaded the E-Pub file, opened it on three or four programs on at least three devices, and could not duplicate the problem. i called Smashwords, and the guy I spoke with could not duplicate it either! Two days ago I opened the .pdf version in WORD 2016, and let it convert the file to docx format, and tried again. It was badly formatted. So I saved the file as Plain Text, and opened it in WORD 2016, on my Asus Netbook computer, with a quad core 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive. That should be able to handle a simple word processor document.... I formatted it using text styles in WORD, not just formatting line by line as I went along. I uploaded it, and immediately downloaded the E-Pub file from Smashwords, after it came out of their meatgrinder, and the formatting in Adobe Digital Editions was nowhere near what the WORD file looked like. I set the word file up to leave a blank line between paragraphs, and indent the first line 1/2" from the left border. Centered text was not at all centered in the E-Pub version in ADE. No lines or space of any kind between paragraphs. No indentation of any sort for first lines of a paragraph. A single .jpg file at the end was broken into thirds, and one of those came out black. i opened it in Bibliovore, and there was a space between the paragraphs, and chapter headings were handled as they were in the WORD file, but still no indented first lines, and centered text other than chapter headings were not at all centered. I opened it in Freda, and the paragraphs looked exactly as intended, though the chapter headings and other centered text, were not handled properly. What is going on here???? SAME file, SAME computer, looked like three completely different books! I just do not understand this!!!! And the question is, how the hell do I fix this, and get this book back up on Smashwords' premium catalog? Frankly, it seems to me that when three apps open the same file, in the same computer, with three different results like this, there must be something wrong with the platform itself! The app with the black bar at the top is ADE. The one with reversed text (white on black) is Freda, and the other one is Bibliovore.
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