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Announcing Calibre 2.0

blog.calibre-ebook.com

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Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#91

Post by dredmorbius »

Can someone point to a good Calibre tutorial?

My use-case: I download material in various formats from online, mostly in PDF, ePub, or some markup format (LaTeX, Markdown, HTML, etc.) I've got a large set of downloads, which I then try to import into Calibre. This is in support of a large research project.

1. It's difficult to tell what I've imported and what I haven't.

2. The import process itself is slow. Enough so that I'll fire it up, get caught up in other stuff, and ... well, tend not to get back to it.

3. The corpus is fairly large: around 1000 books and papers, plus another 5,000 others pulled from web archives.

4. Tracking this by metadata is crucial. Title, author, publication date, and tags. Managing _that_ is a headache on its own, especially adding metadata to works / confirming automatically extracted content is accurate.

5. Once I've got the information organized, reading, referencing, annotating, and other tasks should be supported.

Again: calibre is about the only tool out there I'm familiar with, but it's a pain. Zotero and various LaTeX bibliographic tools are also of some use.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#92

Post by walterbell »

dredmorbius wrote: post #87
walterbell wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre can be configured to use the OS defaults for reading specific file extensions. The option is buried somewhere in the preferences menu of Calibre. On Windows, OSS SumatraPDF will read pdf, epub, djvi, fb, chm and more. You can preset 2up fullscreen & other options, including the carnival yellow default background. It's minimal and can be locked down more than Acrobat, but has still had a handful of public secu…

I use Linux (mentioned though not explicitly stated in my comment above). I've dug for config options and haven't found it. I've also searched for docs and posted on several forums without finding any resolution for this.

Preferences -> Behavior

On the bottom right quadrant of the panel, "Use internal viewer for:"

Clear the checkboxes for each desired format.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#93

Post by RexRollman »

vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

I've seen this complaint with lots of Open Source programs and, while your opinion is valid, I also can't help but feel that you are being a bit ungrateful.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#94

Post by maxerickson »

keithpeter wrote: post #71
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's absolutely desirable in terms of priority, calibre's UI has been not merely ugly for its entire six-year history, it's been a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown for its entire six-year history. We're talking about things like just following generally accepted conventions for how to structure GUI menus. I don't think this is a matter of calibre de-prioritizing fixing the UI. I'm pretty sure it's a con…

"...a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown..." I'd like to see a few more jet-powered unicycles rides. They sound fun. Functionality, especially in niche software, is sometimes more important than some kind of idealised smooth workflow. The nearest physical analogue I can conjure up is to contrast a 'sound system' as used in dances in church halls and community centres round here (wardrobe sized speaker cabinets wi…

The volume knob on the rack based system shouldn't require a screwdriver though.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#95

Post by w1ntermute »

unfamiliar wrote: post #74
keithpeter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...a jet-powered unicycle ride to Crazytown..." I'd like to see a few more jet-powered unicycles rides. They sound fun. Functionality, especially in niche software, is sometimes more important than some kind of idealised smooth workflow. The nearest physical analogue I can conjure up is to contrast a 'sound system' as used in dances in church halls and community centres round here (wardrobe sized speaker cabinets wi…

>Functionality, especially in niche software, is sometimes more important than some kind of idealised smooth workflow. I buy this argument for professional GIS software, database management software, etc. But come one, Calibre basically has 3 purposes: keep a library of ebooks, convert them between formats, transfer to devices. It shouldn't be so complicated. Every time I go open it I have to relearn how it works.

> Every time I go open it I have to relearn how it works.

Then you must be doing something wrong. I use Calibre very infrequently, and yet I've never had any trouble remembering how to convert a book and load it onto my Kindle.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#96

Post by cJ0th »

Maakuth wrote: post #7
marianminds wrote: post #3

One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.

This converter is reasonable: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ I wonder if someone has done a Calibre plugin for it.

thanks for sharing. I didn't know that one. Before I've been using briss

http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#97

Post by claystu »

RexRollman wrote: post #93
vj44 wrote: post #6

I'm sure calibre 2.0 is a great technical feat, and kudos for all the work put into this product, but judging by the screenshot the user interface is equally clunky as in 1.0. This software does mostly everything I need it for to convert ebooks... but can you, the authors, please improve the UI?

I've seen this complaint with lots of Open Source programs and, while your opinion is valid, I also can't help but feel that you are being a bit ungrateful.

I disagree. This is one of the most important pieces of feedback any opensource project can get. Technical merit means nothing if users find the cost of using the interface more trouble than the benefit of the program.

I think the lack of emphasis on creating polished user interfaces is a real ideological stumbling point for the open source movement.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#98

Post by claystu »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #45
skant wrote: post #43

The author of Calibre claims: In my opinion, calibre’s graphic interface is damn good [1] I don't think the author is going to make any strides towards improving/changing the UI [1] http://features.en.softonic.com/interview-kovid-goyal-creato...

I agree with him. It's usable, and easy to understand. It doesn't follow the fads of our time, and thats fine. I struggle to understand why such a superficial demand is at the top of hacker news. Asking every useful software project to hire designers so it fits the Apple Guidelines (yes I'm exaggerating) seems both unproductive and more likely to drive the programming endeavor further out of the apartments of inventi…

Would you mind if car companies switched the gas and break pedals whenever they felt like it. After all, gas pedal on the right is no harder than gas pedal on the left.

Except...the custom is already set.

Most users would rather ignore a program than relearn yet another arbitrary interface when the standard one is good enough.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#99

Post by michaelmrose »

jychang wrote: post #67
Touche wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre makes it dead simple to manage a library of ebooks and allows you to do just about anything that can be done with them. That's the definition of a good UI. Whether it follows modern design trends is irrelevant. A UI overhaul would be a terrible idea.

I disagree. The UI is extremely messy, and far from streamlined. I couldn't figure out how to do basic management tasks at first.

Which tasks are hard to accomplish?

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#100

Post by michaelmrose »

dredmorbius wrote: post #88
jychang wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The UI is extremely messy, and far from streamlined. I couldn't figure out how to do basic management tasks at first.

I agree with you that the calibre UI could use help. *Being specific on where exactly it's deficient would be useful. "It's clunky" really isn't actionable criticism. My own comments are sparse largely as I've found other elements (mostly the readers) so abysmal that I make little use of Calibre.

You realize you can tell it to use your system default to read a given format right its under behavior in preferences
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