John's Blog

Calibre 0.5 is gearing up and I’ve had some more work accepted into Kovid’s pluginize branch. This time it’s a basic bookmark manager for the ebook-viewer app. It allows editing, deleting, exporting, and importing bookmarks for the opened ebook. The GUI isn’t all that great but I’m not a great GUI designer. There a few things polish wise that can still be done with it. Such as not including the internal current page bookmark, better keyboard integration and a search filter. However, as it stands, it gets the job done.

Tags: calibre.

I unplugged my Cybook from the computer without first unmounting the volume. It was still in the process of deleting a few files. When I turned it on the files showed in the library but were unable to be viewed. After I plugged the Cybook back into the computer the file system was mounted as read only and dmesg spit out a large number of IO errors.

The Cybook’s file system was damaged. Thankfully the Cybook uses Fat32. All that was needed to fix the errors was to run the following:

sudo fsck.vfat /dev/sdb -artvVw

/dev/sdb is the device id for the Cybook’s memory. If you are unsure of what it is, plug in the Cybook, wait for it to be detected and run dmesg in the console. At the end of the output there will be information about the device being connected and what device id the system has assigned to it.

Tags: cybook, Linux.

Support for printing will in fact be coming in version 0.5. I’ve committed (to my branch) a new printing framework that fixes the bugs in the old one. Also, I’ve committed some PDF changes. There is now an any2pdf app which will allow for conversion of any supported ebook format into the PDF format. PDF files will also have the first page used as the cover image within Calibre’s library.

There are a few things to know about the printing support. It’s only in the ebook-viewer application. It uses a print style so what is printing may not look exactly the same as it does in the viewer. Page breaks are not honoured, this is to save paper. Javascript is currently being stripped from the book. This should only have an impact on ePub books that utilize Javascript (I don’t know of any that this will be an issue).

If you want a perfect printed representation of an ebook as it is viewed in the ebook-viewer application use any2pdf to convert the ebook into a PDF file.

Just like with the last implementation for printing this could change at some point. However, this version has been deemed good enough for inclusion.

Tags: calibre, ebook.

Calibre will be getting support to print books in the ebook viewer. The code has been checked into my branch already and is just waiting for the the upcoming 0.5 release.

***UPDATE ***

2009-02-11T02:47:26+00:00

Due to some unfortunate bugs the printing support won’t be coming for some time.

Tags: calibre.