I have generated a catalog of ebooks quite a few times without problems, but after I added a book with an accented character in its title, the process always fails. I made a few tests, and it appears that not all accented characters cause problems - I've found the character "à" to be the culprit.
Here's what Calibre has to report about it.
Code:
calibre, version 0.8.14
ERROR: Conversion Error: <b>Failed</b>: Generate catalog
Generate catalog
Sections: Authors, Titles, Series, Recently Added, Descriptions
Catalog_EPUB_MOBI(): Generating mobi for kindle in GUI environment
connected_device: 'None'
book count: 2
opts:
authorClip: 60
catalog_title: u'My Booklist'
connected_kindle: False
descriptionClip: 100
exclude_book_marker: u':'
exclude_genre: u'(\\[.+\\])|(book_is_read)'
exclude_tags: u'~,Catalog,book_check_before_adding'
header_note_source_field: u'#imported_kindle_collections'
merge_comments: ':before:True'
output_profile: 'kindle'
read_book_marker: u'tag:'
search_text: None
sort_by: None
sort_descriptions_by_author: True
sync: True
thumb_width: '1.00'
wishlist_tag: u'Wishlist'
existing thumb cache at C:\Documents and Settings\User101\Application Data\calibre\caches\catalog\thumbs.zip, cached_thumb_width: 1.00"
Begin catalog source generation
DPI = 168; thumbnail dimensions: 84 x 112
Python function terminated unexpectedly
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 16: unexpected end of data (Error Code: 1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site.py", line 132, in main
File "site.py", line 109, in run_entry_point
File "site-packages\calibre\utils\ipc\worker.py", line 181, in main
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\convert\gui_conversion.py", line 68, in gui_catalog
File "site-packages\calibre\library\catalog.py", line 5110, in run
File "site-packages\calibre\library\catalog.py", line 1420, in buildSources
File "site-packages\calibre\library\catalog.py", line 1952, in generateHTMLByTitle
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 16: unexpected end of data