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Announcing Calibre 2.0

blog.calibre-ebook.com

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#41
post #39
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you help out? It's fully open source.

Look at the commits. It's not fully open source at all. The source is available if you want to fork it, but try submitting a patch...

Open source does not mean "Accept All Patches At All Costs", it does not even mean accept any patch at all.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#42
post #7

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.

Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a bit annoying at times.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#44
post #40
post #17

Is there some Calibre plugin to convert scientific articles with math formulas to epub or mobi?

I'm guessing that's a very hard problem, but I'd love to hear otherwise. If you go the standard route: write in latex then pdflatex, you have no information in the pdf as to what those symbols are, right? So this is pretty close to mathematical ocr, with all of the weird symbols that math alone uses and the various meanings of different lengths of underbar or overbar in the article. Am I wrong? Is there more informat…

I think that the solution is much more simple.

Print formula > Convert formula to image (screencap) > Paste image

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#45
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 inventive people and into VCistan

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#46
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a bit annoying at times.

I've used k2pdfopt for reading two-column formatted academic papers on Kindle Paperwhite, it works great.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#47
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 think developing a good UI is hard. More when you develop a multiplatform application like Calibre.

Probably QT is currently the best way to go but the aesthetic is not solved by the framework alone.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#48
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the commits. It's not fully open source at all. The source is available if you want to fork it, but try submitting a patch...

Open source does not mean "Accept All Patches At All Costs", it does not even mean accept any patch at all.

Given that the thread you're responding to leads in with the suggestion to contribute code to improve the application, your point is both factual and totally tangental to the conversation.

If the project is hostile to merging patches (which Calibre's developer had demonstrated), that is relevant when discussing the possibility of a user providing contributions for improving the UI.

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#49
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calibre is open-source and seems to be a Qt +PyQt front-end to a sqlite database, fairly mainstream dev tools. But it doesn't seem to have an active development community with multiple contributors, except for plugins. Anyone know why?

Toxic maintainer. Kovid Goyal is known to be abrasive. I'm looking for good examples. But maybe I've just seen the other end of the arguments and he's okay? I'm guessing the best bits are hidden here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/ Like eg this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934

I remember reporting a bug, a few years ago, though I can't find it now. It was about the weird glitches in the green icons next to the search bar in the toolbar.

These: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9umwphlisjy4uzd/Screenshot%202014-...

I included screenshots at the time. I got brushed off with a "this doesn't happen for me, it's probably your system being messed up" and my bug closed as invalid.

It's still there, across several different OS reinstalls. For that matter, it's still there in recent screenshots from other people: http://www.snapfiles.com/screenfiles/calibre.png

So maybe it's intentional? It seems too ugly for that, but...

Re: Announcing Calibre 2.0

#50

so much hate for the UI! personally, it works and works well for its intended purpose. To me, it's even intuitive at times. By that virtue, it's already better than 90% of software out there, free or not. Can it be better? sure, like everything else in life. Now that I know that the dev is abrasive from other HN comments, i've got even more respect for him, because of the heavier load he has to carried. :)

Agreed! Personally I feel that since he writes and maintains it himself he can be as argumentative as he likes. It's not like he's the first - check out Linus Torvalds for the canonical abrasive open source guy.

And they're right. It's free, you don't like it, go bloody well right it yourself.

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