Kindle Previewer is a great time saver for checking formatting, and I’m very pleased that it runs under Wine, as I’m currently running Fedora 16 (Verne). However, this morning when I ran it, it auto-updated to the latest version, and that crashes. Auto updating is bad enough when you know you have a set of software that works exactly as you like, but updating to a version that won’t run is just bloody rude.

I like em dashes, and use them when writing (or preserving the style of older books when I’m formatting them), but they need some taming for the Kindle, as discussions on MobileRead will show you. If you attempt to insert them between two words without any spaces, the Kindle will stubbornly keep both words together when breaking lines. A simple way of getting round this would be to use a spaced en dash instead, as Jaye Manus suggests, but can we do any better?