It has been a few weeks since I’ve done a calibre week in review. This is partly because I had been working on some new features for the upcoming 0.8 release. I haven’t wanted to talk about it very much until the release gets closer. Kovid said yesterday that he will be reviewing my changes next week. HTMLZ One complaint I hear often is in regard to the inability to edit ebooks....
Once again this is a big week with a lot of little changes. The majority of which were related to TXT input. Format Specifications I was thinking about the fact that for all of the formats I support I use the format specification to know how the reading and writing should happen and how they aren’t part of calibre proper. I have a set of documents that outline what is known about each format I handle....
This is really a two week in review because I didn’t do one last week. The past two weeks I didn’t focus on major changes. I mainly spent my time with little tweaks and closing out bugs. All of these little changes didn’t feel like I accomplished very much but getting them all together it turns out I did quite a bit over the last two weeks. GUI The GUI saw quite a few usability changes....
TXT input got some more work. It now supports the Textile markup language. This can be used in place of Markdown. Textile is also supported by the new auto-detection in TXT input. FB2 output had some more bug fixes. The cover image is now put inside of the coverpage element in the metadata header. This is per the FB2 spec. However, the calibre ebook-viewer does not currently display the cover image that is part of the metadata header....
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....
This week saw some more work on FB2 output. I’ve added support for a few formatting types from the 2.1 spec. Also, a very helpful user submitted a patch for sectionizing. It allows for sectonizing based on the file structure (based on EPUB splitting), no sectonizing and based on TOC. There is one limitation based on TOC sectionization. It only works when the TOC item points to an element within the document....
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....
FB2 output has been improved. It no longer generated very invalid markup. The output generator still isn’t where I want it to be though. The changes are mostly cleanup and fix long standing issues with the output. One major change is I reverted having <h1> tags work as section and title markers. I don’t like having this hard coded into the generator. As far as I can tell FB2 does not support a true table of contents (TOC)....
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....