Announcing Calibre 2.0
blog.calibre-ebook.com
blog.calibre-ebook.com
I found calibre less clunky and very clean once I hid icons, menus and submenus I don't use.
Maybe there should be some kind of toggle mode (easy, god, expert, etc.).
I don't think this is a matter of calibre de-prioritizing fixing the UI. I'm pretty sure it's a conscious choice. They know their UI backward and forward and it works for them, therefore anyone who complains about the UI Just Doesn't Get It. That unicycle is BEAUTIFUL, dammit.
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 with 18" paper cone speakers, horn tweeters, all patched into a rack based preamplifier that only the constructor and a few close associates know how to navigate) and a domestic hifi by (say) Denon. Both have their place.
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.
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.
There are GUI conventions which at this point have been with us for three decades, and no matter what operating system you're using the vast majority of programs you use follow them. I would never argue that it's impossible for a program to be improved by deliberately flouting those conventions -- but I'd argue that you need a defensible rationale for doing so. A sound system for a large space has different tradeoffs and design considerations than a home theatre system does, but it's actually following a different set of well-considered conventions, right? I don't think calibre's UX design is well-considered at all; I think it was put together by someone who doesn't know much about UX design, isn't willing to learn, and whose reaction to even gentle criticism is to dig in his heels.
Calibre has done a few conversions, but given the typical use-case I've found is for trying to get PDFs into anything else vaguely usable, it's almost always a complete wash.
Going to Markdown or LaTeX and from that to the format(s) I want is almost always the preferable route.
*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.
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.
I use calibre for converting web pages I want to read offline into epub, but then I use the file manager to transfer the epub onto my device - it seems to be the easiest way.
Also, on every single conversion I have to tell it again that I don't want a huge margin. Why would I want to make my e-reader's screen ever smaller?
Maybe it's best to build a whole new app out of the low-level libraries and tools that make calibre. A simple app with a simple UI.
I think the lack of emphasis on creating polished user interfaces is a real ideological stumbling point for the open source movement.
However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to download and install every single new minor release also feels like something from a bygone era.)
I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love for it.
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
Edit: thanks for posting that bug report. I was quite excited about contributing to Calibre at the time of filing my bug report, but got such a negative reaction that the thought vanished. How many other missed opportunities have there been, maybe a fork would bring them back?
Anyway, I still rely on Calibre to manage my ebooks, and have donated a couple of times. Despite the messy and confusing UI, it's the only ebook manager I found that does what I need (Kindle sync, multiple layers of tags and categorization, download metadata).
(...) You are not doing us a favor by reporting a bug. On the contrary, you are asking us to do you a favor and spend our valuable time helping overcome a problem _you_ are having. (...)
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934/comments/11
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...
But then... they don't line up. If it was intentional, I'd expect them to be on the same level.
A fork with a sane GUI would kill calibre.
I stopped using it because I can't stand the UI :(
Edit: if someone were to publish independent mockups for a new Calibre UX, it could motivate community feedback and/or dev contributions. The ebook market is larger now than a few years ago, given the rise of mobile.
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...
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
The interface is an unmitigated disaster from tip to toe. There's too much going on. It doesn't need to get hit with the iBooks stick to make it better; it just needs someone with half a clue to delete half the buttons, tabs, modals, windows, panes, lists, checkboxes, and other crap.
Put another way: Eclipse is not the program you want to base your design on.
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.
Probably QT is currently the best way to go but the aesthetic is not solved by the framework alone.
Some frameworks (GNOME in particular) lead to a shit-ton of user-hostile design decisions.
How you use the framework matters a lot. This is where Calibre needs a lot of love. The interface isn't intuitive (I've got v1.25 open now, and ... it's a mess).
For everyone complaining about the UI and management functionality, realize that you are not the target audience. Head over to www.mobileread.com, look at the Calibre forum and the praise Kovid gets, and you'll see that he's largely catering directly to what his core users want.
It is interesting that Calibre and mobileread are still around, and relatively little changed. I lost interest and moved on once pretty much every commercially-available e-book became available in EPUB format. What's left is a very, very specialized core of enthusiasts.
Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.
PDF malware can be used for economic espionage targeting commercial research. What would help is a single open registry which has: bibliographic metadata + hash of known-good PDF for each paper.
Edit: I gave it a test run, and found it does the job very well. Thank you again!
Since EPUB is much more accessible to blind/visually impaired people than PDF, perhaps the federal government could step in and mandate that all articles with content produced using federal grants must be available in a format that the blind/visually impaired can consume as well.
0: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/03/19/is-it-time-for...
I tried all sorts of other things, but this was the least painful.
I'm definitely not a fan of every launch of Calibre showing me a prompt to update, but I'm also not sold on apps that upgrade without my express consent.
http://chocolatey.org/packages/calibre
I'm sure OS X has something similar, but I wouldn't know where to find it.
[0]: http://caskroom.io/ [1]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask [2]: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/...
Currently I'm using an alias to clear the old binary and download the new one. [1]
[0] https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/309
[1] https://blog.notmyhostna.me/make-calibre-updates-less-annoyi...
More recently my reading habits have changed and I much prefer to go directly for my books on my desktop. I've uninstalled calibre now. All I really need is a cli or a basic client (much like ncmpc for mpd) for my books. I'm looking for something along those lines, and am also planning to do a hobby project for that if the urge grows.
[0] On every Arch Linux update.
A quick glance at the documentation says yes.
Ideally, software supports both ways of working (lots of people prefer to have the software take over, lots of people are worried this will make a mess, or don't want to live with some constraint the software imposes, or whatever).
Calibre will only index content imported into its library.
And they're right. It's free, you don't like it, go bloody well right it yourself.
Nobody is claiming he is obliged to act differently. Everyone is just agreeing that he is an asshole and that trying to work with him would be a waste of time. By all means adopt his attitude if you admire it; you'll get the same sentiment from the community.
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.
one recently released such device is Boyue T62 (http://www.banggood.com/Boyue-T62-8G-Dual-Core-6-Inch-WIFI-A...) Here is an overview (the review is for the same device, just rebranded and with previos generation specs) http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/08/11/icarus-illumina-...
You also get much better pdf reading capabilities with these devices.
Until the next generation displays for reading come into play, these look much better overall than kindle, nook, etc.
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 information left in the pdf? Obviously you can just extract images from the pdf and put that into epub, but it's a crappy solution at best.
For a long time, I've wished for something that could ocr handwritten math and make even a shitty pass at ocr-ing to latex. There appears to be no such software. I doubt there's a big market, but there are a lot of people being paid $15+/hour to latex up written math...
Print formula > Convert formula to image (screencap) > Paste image
In EPUB3 readers with full <canvas> support one can translate the paint primitives via pdf.js into JS, too.
From my relatively light explorations of Calibre to date (v. 1.25 on Debian jessie/sid):
⚫ The UI is clunky. Especially when trying to edit / capture bibliographic information I've found it beyond frustrating.
⚫ The built-in readers are severely brain-damaged and I've found no way to change them. The PDF reader is complete and total fail, the eBook reader isn't much better, and I seem to recall that accessing HTML docs is similarly frustrating.
By contrast, I've been impressed by the Moon+Reader Android eBook reader, generally like the Readability online (Web) reader and Android app, and had found a Debian eBook reader that was fairly decent client -- fbreader. Its main disadvantage is in not having the ability to set a maximum content width. I find that 40-45 em is my preferred width in general. Among fbreader's frustrations: I cannot define a stylesheet, though I can apply a selected set of styles (defining margin widths, e.g., but not the _text_ width, which is frustrating). The book I've presently got loaded is either right or center justified -- the left margin is ragged, again, frustrating. And text doesn't advance on a <space>, like virtually any other Linux pager.
If calibre readily supported alternative clients, I'd be a lot happier with it.
⚫ The ability to include / reference / convert Web content would be somewhere north of awesome. There's still a large amount of information online that I reference, but would prefer to archive or cache locally, and/or convert to more useful formats (usually ePub or PDF).
⚫ Optimizing viewing experiences for wide-format, vertically-challenged screens would be hugely useful. 16:9 display ratios mean vertical space is at an absolute premium. Most PDF viewers are utterly brain-dead in this regard (evince, for example, requires four manual repositionings to view a typical 2-up document). The Internet Archive's BookReader does an excellent job of consider positioning content and paging through it as two separate functions. I strongly recommend taking some UI notes from it. https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
Alternatively, the old 'gv' ghostscript Postscript and PDF reader will page through documents in a highly sensible fashion: top-bottom, left-right. Why this was achieved in 1992 while PDF readers of the subsequent 22 years have utterly blundered in this regard escapes me.
That said, I'm looking forward to this showing up in Debian's repos (I've got v1.25 presently).
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Notes:
1. http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...
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 security vulns (much less than Acrobat), http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
On iOS, Marvin is an epub reading app which integrates well with Calibre and includes screen temperature adjustment (similar to Fl.ux) for reading at night.
On the bottom right quadrant of the panel, "Use internal viewer for:"
Clear the checkboxes for each desired format.