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Comment by k_sze | Hacker News Reader

The ability to highlight and browse the highlights is HUGE. It makes Calibre really useful for language learning (e.g. by reading novels). I can now highlight new vocabulary or idioms and see them in context when I need to, without me having to copy and paste into some separate file!

Couple that with the fact that Calibre supports custom dictionary sources and it's just amazing.

The one missing feature to make Calibre perfect for me is proper support for rendering PDF. Calibre currently absolutely sucks at rendering PDFs, but some ebooks are sadly only available as PDFs.

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Unfortunately Calibre is pretty bad for reading Japanese novels. Every amazon.jp novel I ripped has issues rendering the vertical RTL text properly. Each "page" is a chapter, and you have to scroll sideways on the page to move in the current chapter. Frequently, scrolling horizontally blanks after the first screen. It's a mess. I had to force my books to render in horizontal LTR via CSS to be able to read them.

Odd. Your problem might be caused by badly formatted epubs? I'm using Calibre 5.0.0 on Ubuntu and I have no problem with a Chinese novel epub in vertical layout. The mouse cursor even turns sideways for selecting text and I can use the mouse scroll wheel without any modifier key to scroll left and right.

That might have been fixed in 5, I haven't used calibre in a while. As for formatting, I rip my collection from my amazon library, so there's nothing I can do about that unfortunately.

I haven't tried it, but the linked announcement says: "Additionally, the E-book viewer now supports both vertical and right-to-left text."

For me it used to jump to the next chapter instead of the next page when reading Japanese novels but they fixed that bug in 5.0.

Strange, I've used Calibre to convert my amazon.jp purchases and am pretty happy with it. It does convert vertical text into horizontal text by default, but the resulting text is perfectly normal without the problem you described, and you can add CSS to force vertical RTL.

There's some example and the css code they used towards the bottom of this page, if you'd like to take a look: https://webnetforce.net/post-105/

I just convert all my pdf's to epub. It's a pain, but worthwhile long term. Calibre does a good job, but you need to know some regex to clean up the view and avoid stuff like repetitive title and page number.

What do you use to convert pdf to epub?

calibre will convert pdf to epub.

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