John's Blog

Once again this is a weeks in review instead of once. I’ve been focusing more on new features than blogging. Calibre 0.7.57 is out and is also the beta for 0.8. Adding the tweak “test_eight_code = True” will enable the 0.8 features.

Get Books aka Stores

For quite some time I’ve been working on integrating support for searching and connecting to third party stores to make it easier for users to find and acquire books they’re interested in. This is a very large feature and one I’m very excited about. There are two pieces: The individual store plugins that connect the user to a given store and a meta-store search that searches all of the store plugins at once.

For 0.8 I have support for 14 stores. They are a mix of big name, independent, paid, free, and public domain. There is something for everyone. The majority of the stores are implemented though an embedded web browser. This is because the majority of stores are only accessible via their web site. MobileRead is the one exception but I’ll talk about that later.

By default accessing the stores is done though the embedded web browser but each store can be configured to open in the system web browser instead. One major befit of this approach is I’m able to detect ebook downloads. When an ebook is downloaded it is automatically added to the currently open library.

MobileRead is the exception and opens in it’s own search window. Right now it opens to the specific book’s entry in the embedded web browser so you can see details and download the book.

The meta-store search (along with MobileRead’s search dialog) allow for full boolean and field logic. Just like the main calibre window. The search gets results from every store and shows them in one easy to sort list. Title, Author, Price, DRM status, Store, and Formats are all listed.

PDB – Plucker Input

Not much to say about this but it’s been a long time coming. Plucker is now supported as an input format. Not all features are supported (tables for instance). However, plucker files for pretty much every source will have the main content come though.

Tags: calibre, ebook, pdb, plucker, store.

It has been a few weeks since I’ve done a calibre week in review. This is partly because I had been working on some new features for the upcoming 0.8 release. I haven’t wanted to talk about it very much until the release gets closer. Kovid said yesterday that he will be reviewing my changes next week.

HTMLZ

One complaint I hear often is in regard to the inability to edit ebooks. Many people seem to think EPUB is not a good format for editing. Sigil is often the solution given around these parts but some people insist on the need for a book to be contained in a single HTML file. Simply unzipping an EPUB doesn’t accomplish this due to the need to split the files.

To remedy this situation I’ve added a new output format: HTMLZ. Just like TXTZ it is just a zip file with with a different extension to differentiate it. Inside is a metadata.opf file (calibre can read and write metadata to it). Images are preserved, renamed and placed in an images folder. This format is available in the 0.7.54 release.

Also inside is a single HTML file. Even if you’re converting from and EPUB that has been split into multiple parts a conversion to HTMLZ will result in a single HTML file. To go along with this there are a number of ways to configure CSS handling. The default is to place the CSS in separate style.css file. It can also place class based CSS inside of the head element in the HTML itself. Or you can have it write the CSS inline within each element. Finally the last option for CSS is to remove it and convert as much as possible (a very limited set right now) to HTML tags.

As with all of my output format attempts I believe this will have quite a few bugs. Let me know about any issues so I can fix them. I hope people find this useful for their hand editing needs.

FB2 Output

Just a small change to FB2 output this time. Users can now select the genre for the output document. The default is antique but a list of supported genres is available to choose from.

GUI – Toolbars

theducks on MobileRead made a few requests regarding handling of toolbars. He was having trouble with the number of interface action plugins he had added to the toolbar and needed more space.

The first change is removing the split toolbar into two option and make the second toolbar user configurable. This way you can add what ever you want in the order you want to the second toolbar.

Along with this, thducks also wanted to be able to remove the icons on the toolbars so I added an off option to the toolbar icon size setting. This way icons can be removed completely. If they are disabled then the text will automatically be used even if the toolbar text option is set to never show. This way you won’t lose your toolbar.

I also made it so that any toolbar that doesn’t have any items on it will be hidden. All of these toolbar changes are in the 0.7.54 release.

GUI – Menubar

Another change to the GUI which won’t be out until the 0.7.55 release is the addition of a configurable menubar. I personally don’t like the toolbar and added support for a menubar. It is configurable in the toolbar configuration are in preferences. Just like the toolbars and right click menus you can configure what is in the menu and what order they appear in.

The main motivation of the menubar addition was the fact that I use a Mac. OS X always shows a menubar outside of the application window. Calibre never looked quite right on a Mac because it doesn’t have a menu so OS X’s menubar would always appear empty.

GUI – OS X

On OS X the menubar has a number of default items. All other OS’s the menubar is default empty and hidden. Also some toolbar items are not shown by default on OS X because they are available though the menubar. The idea is to provide visually appealing default for OS X and to provide a more initiative experience for Mac users.

I’ve also made the toolbar and statusbar on OS X use the system type instead of the generic Qt toolbar and status bar. They look better and behave as one would expect on OS X. The hide toolbar button for instance now works an d hides the toolbar.

Other

Aside from my changes, I’ve been giving direction to Perkin form MobileRead for enhancements to the Textile input and output. The input changes are already in the latest (0.7.54) release. He’s still working on enhancements to Textile output to ensure it produces the same output that the input supports. He has also identified a few bugs with the current Textile output and is working to fix them too.

Tags: calibre, fb2, GUI, htmlz, textile, txt.