This weeks review of what I’ve been working on is a little late. Overall it wasn’t as productive as last week looking at what was accomplished but I spent just as much time coding as last. With projects like this you can’t judge output by the number of features add or bugs fixed.

The GUI received context sensitive treatment for the device menu. It will only have send to device, when a device is connected and send to card A and B will only enabled when they are available as well. A simple change but one that will reduce confusion.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with Lee Dolsen (ldolse from mobileread) on pdftohtml processing rules. They are nearly complete and the output is looking really good. I know I’ve been saying that for a while now but each week it just keeps getting better. However, PDF is still not an ebook format and should not be treated as such. This simply helps to get content out of the PDF format and into a more manageable one.

One big thing I spent most of my time this week on was eReader input. Yep, eReader pdb files can now be converted to any supported output format. Metadata reading of eReader files is not yet supported. That is on my todo list. The html it produces could probably use some work but that will come as people report issues once 0.6 is released.

The other big thing that has taken up my Calibre time is eReader output. Sadly, it does not work. Also, it will not be working for the foreseeable future. The issue I’ve run into is I don’t know enough about the format to produce a file that can be read by eReader’s reading software. The main problem I face is there are around 66 “sections” to the eReader format header (not the pdb header, this is record 0 of an eReader file). I know what 10 of those sections are and what values they should have as they are used for my reader. Around 40ish of the sections should have a value of 0. However, that leaves 26ish sections that I don’t know what they are, what they do or what value they should have and how it relates to the rest of the file. Suffice it to say until I know more about the format I won’t be able to complete the output plugin.

Oh, I did write an inspector script (it’s in the eReader directory in the Calibre source tree) to help understand the eReader format. If anyone is interested in analyzing the format they can use it to help them see what is in the header.