This time I missed last weeks week in review because I simply forgot. I’m hoping to keep this to a minimum in the future.

The big news is calibre 0.6 has been released. Kovid is now back to his regular (weekly at the least) bug fix releases too. As of now the latest version is 0.6.4 and I get the feeling that 0.6.5 is right around the corner. For a listing of what’s gone into the 0.6 release take a look here.

Some features I’ve been working on that are included in the current release are: asciiize text, and iRex Iliad support.

The asciiize feature is one I’ve been wanting for a while and I’ve finally implemented it. It’s based on the ASCIIize text post I made last week. There is now an –asciiize option for the ebook-convert command and an option for the conversion dialog in the GUI. The basic premise of this feature is unicode characters often are not displayed correctly by ebook readers. My Cybook Gen 3 exhibits this behavior. ASCIIize transliterates the unicode text to an ASCII representation. Meaning it takes “Михаил Горбачёв” and converts it to “Mikhail Gorbachiov”.

The iRex Iliad is now as supported as I can get it. calibre detects it as a device, displays the list of books on the device and you can send books to it using send to device. The part I’m running into issues with is the manifest.xml file. It looks like it’s similar to the Sony PRS’s media.xml file, meaning it is a quick store for metadata. However, I don’t really know what goes into this file or should I say files (there are more than one). It also doesn’t look like the device updates it in any way because I had a user send me the files off of their Iliad and they were empty even though the user has put 20 or so books on the device with the Mobipocket desktop software. On the bright side it works well enough that I don’t think anyone will notice.

On the GUI tweaks front (these won’t be in a release until some point in the future) I’ve added a history drop down to the search field. There is a swap button for authors and title in the metadata bulk dialog, and you can hide the toolbars in the ebook viewer.

The remainder of what I accomplished over the past two weeks was bug fixes and code refactoring. Just the boring stuff that I would rather put off versus actually doing it.