Once again this is a weeks in review instead of once. I’ve been focusing more on new features than blogging. Calibre 0.7.57 is out and is also the beta for 0.8. Adding the tweak “test_eight_code = True” will enable the 0.8 features. Get Books aka Stores For quite some time I’ve been working on integrating support for searching and connecting to third party stores to make it easier for users to find and acquire books they’re interested in....
Coming with the Kindle 3.1 firmware is the ability to have real page numbers. Getting ready for this Amazon has put out a preview release of the 3.1 firmware and has started adding the necessary information to Kindle books to show the page numbers. The page numbers themselves map to the pages of the corresponding print book. Over all it gives a very pleasant experience. Amazon has implemented the page mapping though a new auxiliary file that has the ....
Not much on the calibre front for this past week from me. The only thing I’ve worked on was adding support to the Nook driver for the cover image to be sent to the device with the book. Also, if there is no cover associated with the book a default cover with the title authors and calibre library image are used. Similar to what already happens with Cybook Gen 3 and Opus....
Robert B, who is Astak’s Director of Bus. Devl., posted a blog entry about user replaceable batteries. I mostly agree with him that they are a benefit to consumer electronics. I mostly agree because I don’t see them as a positive in every case. I posted the following on his blog as a comment but I wanted to post it here as well. This is in response to the statement that reviewers don’t get the idea of user replaceable batteries....
A while back I made a post about ASCIIizing Text. With it was a simple python application that would convert Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents. It doesn’t do a basic conversion but also Latinizes the characters when they are outside of the ASCII range. The uni2ascii package I made has a few short comings I’ve decided to fix. The three major problems with it are: 1) Very basic permission checking, 2) Only accepts one file, 3) Required all input to be UTF8 encoded, 4) The decoder was a very literal port of a the ruby version....
Like every week there were miscellaneous bug fixes. However, this week I did a bit more. TCR input and output. Do be warned that the output supports multiple compression levels; the higher levels being slower than the lower. For instance a 200K TXT file as input will take around 25 seconds on the lowest level and 3.5 minutes at the highest. TCR is an compressed text format used mainly by the Psion 3 and 5 series PDAs that were produced in the 90s....
I haven’t had one of these for quite some time. I’ve been working on other projects and on the calibre font I’ve only dealing with small bug fixes. However, this past week I’ve done a bit of work that is worth mentioning. I’ve cleaned up the FB2 output. It fixes some invalid markup. Fixes some issues with text not being displayed by FBReader. It also fixes some issues with invalid characters making there way into hrefs....
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....
One pet peeve of I have with my Cybook Gen 3 is its inability to properly display unicode characters in plain text files. I don’t need anything fancy like Japanese characters just simple things like “ and ” (as opposed to " and “). To solve this problem I’ve been thinking about adding an –asciize option to calibre. I say thinking because I didn’t really know where to start. Thankfully a user recently requested this very functionality in bug #2846....
This week hasn’t seen very much in the way of new features from me. I’ve only added one. This is mainly because I’ve been doing small bug fixes leading up to the beta for 0.6. The new feature, which Kovid helped me to implement, is ejecting the reader from within the GUI. When you mouse over the reader icon in the location list it will show an eject button next to the icon....