Barns and Noble has announced and is pre-selling the new Nook second generation Simple Touch Reader (STR). Looking at the specifications the eReader PDB format is not listed as being supported. Only EPUB and PDF are listed. My concern is the fact that I still get books in the PDB format from B&N and this new Nook isn’t going to be able to read them. I sent and email to B&N’s customer service asking for clarification....
Most this week was spent turning PML input and output. I spent a bit of work bug tracking and enhancing FB2 output as well. The changes for PML input are as follows. Pass along the included cover as the cover when converting (also applies to eReader PDB). Allow for images to be in top level, archivename_img or images directory for PMLZ. Based on that order it will check for images and if they are not found move onto the next location....
I spent the past week fixing as many bugs with the new PML input parser and cleaning up as much of the output as I could. I really need to thank WayneD for helping find bugs with the new code. Also, Kevin Hendricks who has been working on his own parser based on code from a tool that does some work on eReader files. He helped me formulate what output should be derived in certain cases....
PML input had some major changes this week. Thank the user WayneD for helping me out and getting me to actually do the work I’ve been putting off since I introduced PML/eReader as an input format. There is now a metadata reader for PML and PMLZ. WayneD provided me with a set of regular expressions that can extract the metadata from a metatdata comment within a PML document. I took those regexes and created a metatdata plugin that supports both straight PML files as well as the PMLZ archive file....
Mostly bug fixes this week. The majority of them were centered around eReader PDB output and PML generation. eReader PDB output now marks the first image as the cover image if a cover image is not explicitly set. PMLZ got images named properly in the output. PML generation now has .png added to the end of image names. I also fixed a bug where excessive new lines were not being properly removed....
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....
A lot of work went into eReader and PML to have it supported better. Also, a new format has been added. The XHTML to PML parser has been completely rewritten. It is based on the XHTML to FB2 parser I wrote for FB2 output. It produces much better looking PML markup and the displayed output looks very close to the original XHTML source. One major advantage of the new parser is that it accounts for XHTML style information and translates that into PML tags....
This week comes with some great new additions. It also comes with some great new challenges. Not to mention more work for next week. eReader output is complete and working. The files produced are the same format as those produced by Dropbook (more on this in a bit). In addition to eReader output I’ve added metadata writing for eReader files. There is one major issue I’ve come across concerning the eReader format....
Device interfaces can now be configured in the GUI. Also, there is a simple framework for creating plugin configuration widgets. I’ve added a metadata reader for the eReader format. However, eReader supports 3 ways to set the metadata in the file. In the pdb header (only supports setting a short title). In the metadata section of the file (supports the most information: title, author, publisher, copyright, isbn). Embedded in the text as a comment....
It seems that PDF is becoming the never ending format for me. Maybe I should start naming the posts PDF Work instead of Calibre Week in Review… One minor and one major change to PDF processing this week. The minor change was a fix for bug 2342. German umlauts are now displayed correctly in the output. The major change is PDF output now supports comics. cbz, cbr, cbc are some of the input formats for comics that are support and now you can turn them into a PDF....