As a person living in the USA I highly prefer double quotation marks to single quotes when denoting speech. Some authors use the single quote for effect but mostly it’s just a style choice. I find UK authors generally use the two interchangeably. Tolkien books are a good example. I have The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Children of Hurin. The Hobbit use double quotes while the other two uses single quotes....
This has been a busy week for me on the Calibre front. All of my changes were to pluginize and the first three I talk about also made it into trunk and will be appearing in the next release. I re-worked the mobi metadata reader so that it does not read the entire file into memory. It only reads the parts of the file that hold the metadata. The advantage is reading the metadata is now about five times faster....
I’ve been working on a few new features for Calibre recently. They will appear once pluginize is turned into trunk. All of the recent features that I though were going to be part of the 0.5 release are currently in pluginize. I was under the impression that pluginize was going to be released as 0.5. Looks like the pluginization is taking a bit more time than expected. I don’t know when any of these changes will appear but I know that they will eventually hit trunk....
Support for printing will in fact be coming in version 0.5. I’ve committed (to my branch) a new printing framework that fixes the bugs in the old one. Also, I’ve committed some PDF changes. There is now an any2pdf app which will allow for conversion of any supported ebook format into the PDF format. PDF files will also have the first page used as the cover image within Calibre’s library....
The Cybook Gen 3 uses it’s own image file for thumbnails. The t2b file is generated by the device based upon the image found in the ebook. If there is no image a default one with the file name written across it is created. One of the feature request for Cybook support in Calibre is for the t2b thumbnail files to be generated on the computer and moved to the device....
The usbms driver is mostly done. Everything is implemented and it works. Testing is all that’s needed now. The Cybook is working and Kindle support should be committed soon.
This Christmas Santa was very nice to me. He gave me a Cybook Gen 3 ebook reader. I’ve really been needing a new one since Tati has been monopolizing (this isn’t a bad thing) the Sony Prs505 we already had. Sadly the ebook management application I often use (Calibre) didn’t support the Cybook. Calibre is an open source application and is written in Python. Both of these aspects are major benefits for the project....
The few eBook formatting tools I’ve posted all share one major flaw. They can only handle a single file as input. This is a problem when you want to run it on all or a number of different eBooks. If you are able to use Bash there is a simple way to run any single input command with multiple items. This first method gets input from a single directory. This method will not go into subdirectories for input....
It’s come to my attention that while I’ve posted a few eBook formatting tools I wrote and use I never posted how to build them. Since I’m using Qt the easiest way to build them is to use qmake and make. The build process is simple. Create a pro file for the project say fix_end_ebook_txt.pro. Run qmake then run make. You will end up with an executable. Just remember that this requires Qt, make, and a C++ complier (g++ on *nix or mingw on Windows)....
Continuing my work to clean up my eBooks I’ve written another little tool to help. I like for my eBooks to have two blank lines at the end of the file. The only major caveat of this one is it assumes Unix end of lines. Meaning a single n character. In order for this to work correctly use of the dos2unix tool is necessary for files that use a different new line format....