Calibre - ebook management

Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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Hydaral
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Re: calibre

#16 Post by Hydaral »

Magibon wrote:
Hydaral wrote:I believe the registry "functions" are actually macros, so it's a different syntax:

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${registry::DeleteKey} "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Trolltech"
thanks for the help.. but that's not the correct syntax.
im familiar with NSIS and have successfully compiled many launchers.
Really? That's the syntax I'm using in my launchers. Maybe we are using different implementations.

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Magibon
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Re: calibre

#17 Post by Magibon »

Hydaral wrote:
Magibon wrote:
Hydaral wrote:I believe the registry "functions" are actually macros, so it's a different syntax:

Code: Select all

${registry::DeleteKey} "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Trolltech"
thanks for the help.. but that's not the correct syntax.
im familiar with NSIS and have successfully compiled many launchers.
Really? That's the syntax I'm using in my launchers. Maybe we are using different implementations.

yep.. when i tried your syntax.. NSIS refuses to compile..
Im using the latest NSIS.

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#18 Post by webfork »

Some usage notes

Like most reviewers I've seen, I'm really impressed. The ability to search for e-books, the way it connects to devices, and even the news downloader were all great.

However, the main reason I wanted to use this program was to move various existing files into a format that my Kindle can read, so I tested both very new PDF and very old, poorly formatted text file conversions. Kindle supports both natively, but PDF files are frequently HUGE and hard to read (one of the few moments I wish I had a regular tablet device), while text files with bad carriage returns also look terrible.

Test: PDF Conversion
  • I was a little confused by some of the controls to convert. The trick is:
    1. To watch the lower-right hand corner of the screen where jobs are listed.
    2. When you do select Convert (either individually or as a group) when you click OK it will go down into this jobs list.
    Single-column -> MOBI

    Very impressed. The converted info looked great on the Kindle. The table of contents didn't work and it didn't understand complex formatting, but that wasn't a big deal for the Kindle.

    I have a few PDFs that this program was able to take apart and put into a much cleaner and radically smaller format.

    Two-column -> MOBI

    Mixed results -- need to retest.

Test: TXT Conversion
  • I tested an old text file with some ugly bad line breaks, but even tweaking the settings a bit I couldn't seem to get it right. I'd like to figure out a way to fix that in an automatic way.

    I didn't test out the content server mostly because there was no information on that and I didn't have a net connection at the time of analysis. Edit: I figured out under the Preferences menu that it runs on the IP address port 8080 (something like http://123.12.14.121:8080)

Wishlist
  • Option for plain black and white outline-style icons at the top of the screen. I found the colors a little overwhelming.
  • Included help file
  • A little more in the way of a file viewer and an included PDF viewer. I'm fairly sure the author could include a copy of Sumatra to do the job.
  • A way to physically edit files (apart from the "Tweak" program available for ePub and HTMLz), especially to help fix unclear conversions.

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Ascend4nt
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Re: calibre

#19 Post by Ascend4nt »

I just posted about this elsewhere, but I figure it's good to document here as well. Calibre has an e-reader that can be used standalone (without going into the inventory program), as well as a command-line ebook converter, and other command-line utilities (check the Calibre subfolder).

Using Calibre's ereader standalone: launch 'ebook-viewer' which can be found here:

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Calibre Portable\Calibre\ebook-viewer.exe
The document types support is pretty varied, although it has trouble with djvu and pdf files (better suited for STDU Viewer and Foxit, respectfully). I currently have these document types assigned to 'View in Calibre' (using Open++):

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*.epub;*.lrf;*.htm;*.html;*.xhtm;*.xhtml;*.lit;*.mobi;*.pdb;*.prc;*.snb;*.cbz;*.cbr;*.cbc;*.odt;*.doc;*.docx;*.rtf
Using Calibre's ebook converter standalone: launch 'ebook-convert' which can be found here:

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Calibre Portable\Calibre\ebook-convert.exe
The basic command-line for launching ebook-convert is to specify the input file and the output file. If you specify an output file extension, it can determine the correct way to convert it. For example:

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ebook-convert.exe MyBook.mobi MyBook.epub
The full command-line help from ebook-convert, for reference:
Usage: ebook-convert.exe input_file output_file [options]

Convert an ebook from one format to another.

input_file is the input and output_file is the output. Both must be specified as the first two arguments to the command.

The output ebook format is guessed from the file extension of output_file. output_file can also be of the special format .EXT where EXT is the output file extension. In this case, the name of the output file is derived the name of the input file. Note that the filenames must not start with a hyphen. Finally, if output_file has no extension, then it is treated as a directory and an "open ebook" (OEB) consisting of HTML files is written to that directory. These files are the files that would normally have been passed to the output plugin.

After specifying the input and output file you can customize the conversion by specifying various options. The available options depend on the input and output file types. To get help on them specify the input and output file and then use the -h option.

For full documentation of the conversion system see
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html

Whenever you pass arguments to ebook-convert.exe that have spaces in them, enclose the arguments in quotation marks.

Options:
--version show program's version number and exit

-h, --help show this help message and exit

--list-recipes List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a
builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert "Recipe Name.recipe"
output.epub


Created by Kovid Goyal <kovid@kovidgoyal.net>

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#20 Post by webfork »

Using Calibre's ebook converter standalone: launch 'ebook-convert'
Argh. I was looking for that a few months ago and couldn't seem to find anything definitive. Thanks for the post.

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#21 Post by webfork »

I've seen a few complaints about how big and unmanageable calibre is (sort of an iTunes for books) so wanted to point out a somewhat basic/minimalistic alternative:

http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshot ... 35972.html
(Requires Java)

Conversion and other tools are (by comparison) tiny but it looks as if it handles ebook management well. Also, I much prefer the user interface.

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Ascend4nt
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Re: calibre

#22 Post by Ascend4nt »

webfork, good idea about looking at alternatives. I'd commit to calibre if they didn't duplicate my entire ebook collection to a local drive. The responses on their forums to this wasteful technique is basically 'just deal with it' or 'your primitive intellect wouldn't understand alloys and compositions and things with molecular structures' and 'hard drive space isn't expensive - just buy more', etc. It's a shame really as its otherwise the swiss-army knife of ebook management!

For now I just use VirtualVolumesView to catalog what I have, then look up title/author which usually gets me what I want. I should probably use something more comprehensive with a true database system like SMF though..

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Midas
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Re: calibre

#23 Post by Midas »

Ascend4nt wrote:I'd commit to calibre if they didn't duplicate my entire ebook collection to a local drive. The responses on their forums to this wasteful technique is basically 'just deal with it' or 'your primitive intellect wouldn't understand alloys and compositions and things with molecular structures' and 'hard drive space isn't expensive - just buy more', etc. It's a shame really as its otherwise the swiss-army knife of ebook management!

Pretty much how I feel about calibre (as commented at www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2119#comment25044). :(

Alternatives really welcome, since my library (mainly PDFs and EPUBs) is getting huge...

Marc
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Re: calibre

#24 Post by Marc »

If there was a Foobar for ebooks... though Foobar is not perfect / I use it for management porpuses rather than pleasure of listening, since as Carl Jung points "music are affections" that is that have an effect on the emtional level, I would expect the UI to go according to my listening mood. So for the pleasure of listening I use Winamp with MMD3 skin. But as I said before, in terms of management Foobar is ideal, and as there are plenty of application for reading ebooks, is in that regard that I would hope "there was a Foobar" for ebooks.

Since Calibre is open source, unlike Foobar, is it to be expected some sort of interface mod or skin?

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#25 Post by webfork »

Marc wrote:Since Calibre is open source, unlike Foobar, is it to be expected some sort of interface mod or skin?
Evidently there are skins for Calibre:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showth ... p?t=129520

... although I would compare this more to iTunes than Foobar.

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Midas
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Re: calibre

#26 Post by Midas »

webfork wrote:I would compare this more to iTunes than Foobar.

Ditto -- see above... :roll:

Marc
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Re: calibre

#27 Post by Marc »

Well... I was kind of comparing Calibre to Foobar in regards of how it should be, except for the closed-source.

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webfork
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Re: calibre (TEBookConverter)

#28 Post by webfork »

Midas wrote:Alternatives really welcome, since my library (mainly PDFs and epubs) is getting huge...[/list]
Ozok is working on a frontend that I haven't tested.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tebookconverter/
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/E-B ... rter.shtml

He indicated it's not portable but that may be added in the near future.

Edit: Now has it's own thread.

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#29 Post by webfork »

Ghacks did a good overview of some of the cool things coming out with Calibre's v.2:

http://www.ghacks.net/2014/08/23/calibr ... rovements/

... having been a bit disappointed with various ebook editors I've tested, this was a welcome development.

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webfork
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Re: calibre

#30 Post by webfork »

I was amused to see this note on a major gaming publisher website: they listed calibre as a method for converting documents to "ePubs" (ebooks) since they don't appear to have a plan to distribute ebooks via another method.

http://paizo.com/paizo/faq#v5748eaic9n9i

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