John's Blog

This is really a two week in review because I didn’t do one last week. The past two weeks I didn’t focus on major changes. I mainly spent my time with little tweaks and closing out bugs. All of these little changes didn’t feel like I accomplished very much but getting them all together it turns out I did quite a bit over the last two weeks.

GUI

The GUI saw quite a few usability changes. I’ve added auto compete to the authors field. This works the same as the tags field but starts completion with the & character instead of ,. There were a few issues that users pointed out relating to this change but they have all been corrected. It turns out that the issues were present with the tags completion but no one had noticed.

I added a confirmation dialog when stopping a running job. There is the possibility of a job finishing before the user confirms but I don’t see that as an issue. The user either wanted to stop the job and it’s stopped or they don’t and it finished properly.

The Regex Builder window saw some changes. Search next and previous were added so the user can cycle though the matched items more easily. Also, when clearing the regex text entry the highlighting will automatically clear. There were also some tweaks to remove the delay caused when testing without any input text. I’ve also implemented caching for so each time the wizard is opened it won’t reconvert the input document. It saves the result and just displaying it each time. The Search and Replace dialog also makes use of the caching across each search and replace field.

There was also some more work done with making entries into history entries. The Regex input fields (search and replace) now store previous entries. The filename import in Add books also saves previous regexes used for importing books.

The last GUI change was with the Send Specific Formats to Device dialog. It now only displaying formats that are present and or convertible. It also tell the user the number out of the total number of books that are in a particular format. It also notes which formats are convertible and which are not. All items in the dialog are also sorted from most to least preferred.

Heuristics

Italicize common cases saw some tweaks to the matching patterns to make them more robust. I foresee this being a weekly occurrence for some time.

RTF Output

A number of RTF output bugs were fixed. An issue with incorrect spacing between letter and missing spaces around italicized text. Also, the generated markup was greatly altered. It is simpler and produces more consistant results. It also allows for h tags to be turned into RTF style headings. So converting from calibre generated RTF to say EPUB the headings will carry over properly as headings. I still consider RTF output a work in progress and relegate it to experimental status.

FB2 Output

The language is now set correctly.

PML Input

Soft scene breaks are now retained. PML also saw a bug fix relating to the \T tag. The biggest change to PML input is support for multi-level table of contents. Previously the toc from a PML file was flattened. Now the levels are properly retained.

TXT Input

Like PML input TXT input now retains soft scene breaks between paragraphs. I also changed heuristic processing on TXT input to not enable preserving whitespace. Instead whitespace at the beginning of a paragraph is maintained by default. Also I rewrote the preserve whitespace function to only use   when necessary instead of in place of every regular space.

TXT Output

Textile formatted output is not supported. This complements Markdown output and Textile input. Soft scene breaks are now detected and written. The scene breaks can either be empty paragraphs or defined by CSS top margin.

Tags: calibre, fb2, GUI, pml, rtf, txt.

Not much happened this week. A few bug fixes and a new output format, RTF. It produces acceptable results. It also embeds images into the file. The output could use some tweaking, but this will come with time. The only caveat is the output is ascii only. This is to keep compatibility with Cailbre’s RTF intput which can only accept ascii rtf files.

Pluginize has been merged back into trunk. Once a bit of testing is done by Kovid, he will be rolling out a beta for the 0.6 release. For those of you, like me, who use Ubuntu and build Calibre from source, there is a little change you will need to make in order to have it build. Open the file /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PyQt4/uic/Compiler/qtproxies.py and modify _qwidgets on line 238 to include “QWizardPage”.

Tags: calibre, pyqt, python, qt, rtf.