I’ve become active in contributing to calibre again. So far I’ve been focusing on fixing issues related to the output formats I maintain. I’ve been focusing on FB2 and TXT output at the moment.

With FB2 output my goals were to fix as many bugs with it as possible and to produce 100% valid output. The first goal corresponds nicely to the second because most of the open bugs dealt with invalid markup.

FB2 output underwent some very large changes with a large amount of code being re-written. Also, I’ve removed a number of options. The idea is to simplify the code while working toward valid output and to remove options that were really just work arounds for invalid output in certain cases.

Overall I’m pleased with the FB2 output changes. It’s 100% valid (at least with the test book I ran though it) and the code is simpler. As always if any issues are found with the output a ticket would be appreciated.

TXT output had one small bug fix and one major change. TXT output can now produce Markdown formatted text. However, I’m not fully satisfied with the markdown generation. I didn’t spend much time with it and as of now it doesn’t appear to be taking css styling into account. I only pushed the xhtml from the OEB intermediate stage into html2markdown. I need to spend some more time with it. My fear is I may have to abandon the use of html2markdown if it’s unable to cope with css.

One other change with me getting back into calibre development is my working branch. I’ve changed it to lp:~user-none/calibre/dev because of some issues relating to my previous branch and some failures with upgrading the branch format.