This week I finally sat down and spend some time with Markdown input and output. Both saw major changes. Markdown input was bumped to upstream version 2.0. Output was completely rewritten from scratch. Markdown output is now completely custom code (not using a third party output module like before). I based the new markdown code off of the Textile output classes I helped Perkin to create. As with all new code and major changes there are probably bugs....
About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such as headings, bold, and italic. There are other easier ways to format an ebook. However, in this case simpler does mean basic....
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....
This is a short week for the week in review because I’m now doing my week from Friday to Thursday. Last week I ended my week on Monday so this review only has a few days worth of work. TXTZ I’ve added an import plugin that runs over TXT content when it is added to the library. What happens is the TXT file is scanned looking for Markdown (inline or reference) and Textile image references....
I’ve been putting up my week in reviews on based on a week starting on Monday for some time now. I’ve been thinking about this and it doesn’t really make much sense. Calibre has a release pretty much every Friday now. So starting next week I’m going to change my week in review to be Friday though Thursday. This way features I talk about in my review will be in the just released version....
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’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....