Calibre This week I focused on PDF output. There was a bug introduced in 0.8.17 that broke PDF output which has now been fixed. I was also able to fix PDF output on OS X. The PDF output engine on OS X is now using OS X’s internal PDF engine instead of Qt’s. Page sizes other than A4 are now possible and the PDFs produced are no longer large image based monstrosities....
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 has been a productive one. I’ve made a lot of small GUI enhancements and did some work on PDF input as well. All of these changes have not made it into trunk yet. This is mainly because Kovid has been away this week. I’ve added auto complete to a number of the input control on the GUI. Authors, Publisher, and Tags all auto complete pretty much everywhere now. The Tags will even auto complete in the table view in the main window....
The bulk of what I’ve done this week was the many bug fixes going into the Calibre beta. The one other thing I worked on was bring image extraction back to PDF input. It works as well as the 0.5.x series now. Meaning it will handle simple cases but there are still some bugs.
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....
This weeks review of what I’ve been working on is a little late. Overall it wasn’t as productive as last week looking at what was accomplished but I spent just as much time coding as last. With projects like this you can’t judge output by the number of features add or bugs fixed. The GUI received context sensitive treatment for the device menu. It will only have send to device, when a device is connected and send to card A and B will only enabled when they are available as well....
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....
Other than little fixes here and there I’ve mainly focused this week on getting PDF output complete. It now supports profiles as well as custom page sizes. A little work is still needed on the processing rules for the html produced by the PDFInput. Otherwise, PDF Input/Output is complete. Though, pluginize is still in flux so what is complete now might not be complete next week as new requirements and interfaces are added....
This has been a busy week for Calibre. The new conversion pipeline is complete. Part of this change is there is a new framework for command line options. I’ve spent most of this past week moving the PDF input/output and TXT input/output over to use the new framework. The other major work I’ve completed is moving the pdfmanipulte program and it’s commands over to the new command line option framework. I’ve also added a few new commands to pdfmanipulate....
The other day on mobileread there was a post about combining pdf files. The person has their books in pdf and they are divided by chapters. This got me thinking about the state of the pdf tools in Calibre. There was only one, pdftrim. I’ve added three new pdf manipulation tools. Merge to combine multiple pdfs into one. Split to split a pdf into multiple files by page. And info to show information about the pdf....