The quick start guide is something I’ve been neglecting for quite some time. When calibre 1.0 was released I really should have updated the guide at that time but I didn’t. This past week I decided that it had been long enough and the guide had to be updated. I’m happy to say that before I updated it, the majority of the information in the guide still applied. This is a testament to the stability of calibre....
About Formatting Tips. This is a very easy formatting type and is similar to doing a drop cap. The big difference is a raised initial the letter is on the base line and is higher than the other letters. Only the first letter of the first paragraph of a chapter should be raised. Simply wrap the first letter in a span tag referencing the appropriate CSS class like so. <p><span class="ri">L</span>orem....
Calibre This week I focused on PDF output. There was a bug introduced in 0.8.17 that broke PDF output which has now been fixed. I was also able to fix PDF output on OS X. The PDF output engine on OS X is now using OS X’s internal PDF engine instead of Qt’s. Page sizes other than A4 are now possible and the PDFs produced are no longer large image based monstrosities....
This week I finally sat down and spend some time with Markdown input and output. Both saw major changes. Markdown input was bumped to upstream version 2.0. Output was completely rewritten from scratch. Markdown output is now completely custom code (not using a third party output module like before). I based the new markdown code off of the Textile output classes I helped Perkin to create. As with all new code and major changes there are probably bugs....
Since taking over Sigil I haven’t had much time to spend working on calibre. However, I haven’t abandoned calibre. It’s still a priority and something I will continue to work on. This week I focused on Get Books. Nothing new was added but I went through most of the store plugins and fixed a few of them to support changes to the stores. As of 0.8.17 all stores should be working properly....
About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such as headings, bold, and italic. There are other easier ways to format an ebook. However, in this case simpler does mean basic....
About Formatting Tips. Calibre’s robust conversion engine can be leveraged to help with formatting tasks. Converting with calibre helps when you are dealing with a format you cannot easily edit, or a format you aren’t very familiar. It’s also helpful in situations where the insides of the file is such as mess it’s hard to understand. Many of these tasks are geared toward people who already have an ebook in an existing format that they need to clean up....
Previously I posted about an instance of copyright infringement. It was found that a company called HamsterSoft was using portions of calibre in their proprietary and closed source ebook conversion program. The good news is the situation has been resolved. On August 15th I was contacted by Pavel, one of the founders of HamsterSoft. He said that they are committed to their Hamster Free eBook Converter (HFEC) program and they feel compliance with calibre’s license (the GNU GPL v3) is their only option....
Update: HamsterSoft has fixed the issue and is now in compliance with the GPL. They are no longer in violation of my copyright in regard to calibre Introduction Copyright infringement is something many creators come face to face with. Over the past two months it has been something I’ve been dealing with. A third party is using portions of calibre in their proprietary application in violation of the GNU GPL version 3 (GPL v3) that calibre is licensed under....
This week saw some more work on Get Books. Once change is not user visible but makes it easier for new stores to be added. The other change is user visible and was suggested by a user. I’ve added a base class for OPDS OpenSearch based stores. It will use the OpenSearch url and retrieve all results. It then puts them into a SearchResult object for use with Get Books. Individual stores will need to do some massaging of the results because I’ve found that the results are often inconsistent from store to store....