By T. R. Halvorson
Synoptic Text Information Services, Inc.
May 7, 2025
Dedicated to the Public Domain
Are you a KDP Publishing author or publisher who has gotten a problem email saying:
We’ve reviewed your book(s) and determined that the interior file provided for the book(s) includes images of text which do not meet our quality guidelines. Images of text within the interior content are not allowed when the book is primarily composed of scanned or image-captured text, or when the image quality makes the text illegible.
We found that the book(s) listed above is primarily composed of images of text.
In order to publish the book(s), update your interior file(s) to replace scanned or image-captured text with reflowable text and resubmit the book(s) for publishing.
Did your manuscript file have few or even no images? Did you wonder, what could KDP be talking about?
This happened to me. The book had a few images. One was the company logo on the copyright page. Another was a small excerpt in greyscale drawn from the cover and placed on the title page. The remaining three were greyscale portraits of the 19th century authors whose works in German were being presented for the first time in English. That is not much. So, what did KDP mean by saying, “primarily composed of images of text?”
Not saying this will always be the answer for all of you, but in my case the answer was a font problem.
My main body font for this kind of title was Minion Pro. I had gotten a new computer and installed the font. When creating the PDF in Microsoft Word using printing standards settings to embed fonts into the PDF, which by default produced PDF/A, Office 365 did not embed Minion Pro. Maybe with the new computer, Word could not find the licensing information. Maybe, as many online said, there was an abrupt and unannounced change in recent months where Word was not embedding some fonts that it had embedded before. Whatever the cause, on inspecting the PDF file in PDF-XChange Editor, Minion Pro was not listed as among the embedded fonts.
The text in the PDF looked like Minion Pro. So, what gives?
Well, when Word either cannot or will not embed a font, maybe it could substitute a font or leave substitution to the destination environment.
Or maybe it rasterizes the font, in this case, Minion Pro. I noticed that the PDF file was very much larger than any of my prior KDP manuscript PDFs had been. It makes sense that rasterization would bloat the file.
It also makes sense that KDP’s processing then would think the file was, as the email said, “primarily composed of scanned or image-captured text.” Not exactly, but the result is as good as, so yes, this time, KDP was right.
The bloated file also can cause upload problems or preliminary processing problems. The process might cough on it, halt, and report that it encountered an unspecified error. There are many online discussions about the uselessness of the cryptic error message on that event. One work-around suggested for that is reuploading the cover PDF again, which will launch new processing not only of the cover but the interior manuscript file as well. After many go-arounds of that, you might get the processing to finish and be able to preview your book. With the bloated file, however, there could be a long delay before you can preview the book in the online KDP previewer. I tried this and that was my experience, and the email about the book being “primarily composed of scanned or image-captured text” came after that.
Not being sure how to fix the Word behavior to embed Minion Pro, instead, I changed my output method to printing through the CutePDF Writer printer. (Install it and it becomes another printer driver in Word’s Print dialog. It prints to file.) Sure enough, Minion Pro was embedded in the output file and the file was very much smaller, in the ballpark of the sizes of my prior books.
In the course of messing around experimenting and studying to find a solution, I also came across a KDP page that says, while other standards can be used, KDP prefers PDF/X-1a. It happens that PDF-XChange Editor can, via Save As, change Word’s output of PDF/A to PDF/X-1a. File > Save As > Browse opens the Save As Dialog. In the Save as Type dropdown list, there are options for:
- PDF/A Document (*.pdf)
- PDF/X Document (*.pdf)
Choose PDF/X, and the Options button on the dialog goes from greyed out and inactive to bright and active. Clicking Options lets you access a dropdown list of standards, at the time of writing:
- PDF/X-1a
- PDF/X-3
- PDF/X-4
You also have the option to embed either the whole font of each embedded font or a font subset, which is what PDF-XChange Editor thinks are the characters in the font that your file actually uses.
You can also decide whether to have PDF-XChange Editor show you a report of the outcome when it is done, and I recommend you accept that option. The report gives useful information.
Then inspect the output file to see which fonts are listed as having been embedded. File > Document Properties opens the Document Properties dialog. In the Categories pane at the left, select Fonts. The right side of the dialog then will list the fonts that PDF-XChange Editor finds embedded.
When I took the above steps, my problem disappeared. Of course, all that did was prove what the problem was. What I need to do next is solve the problem of getting Word to just embed my Minion Pro directly. Then I would not have to go around Cobb’s Hill to get there.