This week saw massive improvements to TXT input. I started the week with a slew of changes and as soon as I had implemented the first of them Lee Dolsen contacted me. We’ve worked together before improving PDF input. Since then he’s done a lot of work with preprocessing of PDF and other not so clean input. TXT input now auto detects the character encoding of the file. It isn’t 100% accurate but should work for the majority of cases....
I did some work with PDF output. Mainly I refactored some of the output generation code to reduce redundant sections. Over all there won’t be any user visible changes. The main reason I dove back into PDF output was because a user on OS X noted that PDF produced were not searchable. Windows users are getting searchable PDFs and on Kovid’s Gentoo Linux machine he was able to get a searchable PDF....
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....
It’s been a while since I’ve made any posts. Mainly work and other matters have kept me away. I haven’t been working on very much recently. This isn’t to say my participation with calibre has been abandoned. I’m still making regular bug fixes. I’ve also been working on a rather large change that is coming along much slower that I would like. Mainly metadata caching and muli way syncing. I was shooting for the end of March to complete the changes but it might not be done until the end of April....
Teleread has published my Beginner’s Guide to Calibre.
Kovid just tagged the 0.6.33 release so it should be out the door later today. Only one major feature from me this week. The PRS driver can new customize what gets turned into a collection. The default was and is series and tags. Now under the device interface configuration you can specify any metadata field. The main use for this change is so people who have a large number of tags can disable collections being created from them....
I’ve committed a fix for the Cybook 2.0 firmware id issue I posted yesterday. In calibre I’ve combined the Gen 3 and Opus device interfaces into one generic Cybook interface. Both were very similar and the Opus was just a subclass of the Gen 3. Also, with the 2.0 firmware being for both the Gen 3 and Opus there should be no difference in the capabilities of the two devices. If you own an Opus you will still want to use the Opus profile however, when you connect the device it will just show as using the Cybook interface....
On Christmas eve Bookeen finally released the long awaited 2.0 firmware for the Cybook Gen 3 and Cybook Opus. As soon as I returned from my Christmas vacation I upgraded my Gen 3 to the 2.0 version. Today while debugging a device issue for calibre I noticed that my Gen 3 kept being detected as an Opus. Doing a little digging I found this: $ calibre-debug -d Version: 0.6.32 USB devices on system: ....
There was a major change this week to the device infrastructure. Kovid merged (with some modification) my changes to allow “Send to device” to use custom device paths just like “Save to disk”. Kovid’s major change to my implementation are having a separate save template for “Send to device” and allowing for per device overrides of the template. Kovid and I spent yesterday testing and it is working well. Expect it in the next release....
I spent a bit of time working on calibre this week. I worked on profiles, devices and a bug fix here and there. A few new profiles were added. Specifically profiles for the Sony PRS 300 and 900. They have a different screen size and resolution than the 6" models so they warranted their own profiles. I added support for two new devices. The Airis Dbook and the Binatone Readme. Along with supporting new devices I also reorganized and renamed a few....