John's Blog

The other day on mobileread there was a post about combining pdf files. The person has their books in pdf and they are divided by chapters. This got me thinking about the state of the pdf tools in Calibre. There was only one, pdftrim.

I’ve added three new pdf manipulation tools. Merge to combine multiple pdfs into one. Split to split a pdf into multiple files by page. And info to show information about the pdf. Info is especially handy when you want to work with split and need to know how many pages are in the document.

To stop issue with naming conflicts (pdfinfo is used by poppler-utils) and to keep the amount of pdf* names under control I’ve created a git/bzr like wrapper for all of Calibre’s pdf manipulation tools. pdfmanipulate is the base command. A subcommand (see them all with –help) is added after.

$ pdfmanipulate --help
Usage:
pdfmanipulate command ...

command can be one of the following:
[info, merge, split, trim]

Use pdfmanipulate command --help to get more information about a specific command

Manipulate a PDF.
...

$ pdfmanipulate merge --help
Usage: pdfmanipulate merge [options] file1.pdf file2.pdf ...

Merges individual PDFs. Metadata will be used from the first PDF specified.
...

Tags: calibre, pdf.

I’ve been working on a few new features for Calibre recently. They will appear once pluginize is turned into trunk. All of the recent features that I though were going to be part of the 0.5 release are currently in pluginize. I was under the impression that pluginize was going to be released as 0.5. Looks like the pluginization is taking a bit more time than expected. I don’t know when any of these changes will appear but I know that they will eventually hit trunk.

One of the two recent features I’ve been working on is a plain text output converter. Just like mobi, epub and what not you give it a supported ebook format and it will output the book as a plain text file.

The other feature I’ve been working on is much more interesting and useful. It is auto-convert for the GUI. Many music managers will auto-convert a music file that isn’t supported by the device into a format that is supported by the device than transfer the supported file. This is what has been added to Calibre. No longer will you get a not supported format error when sending an ebook to the device that isn’t in a format supported by the device. Calibre will automatically convert the ebook into a format supported by the device and transfer the supported format instead.

Tags: calibre, ebook.