Another eBook-Catalog

[Tommy]

Hi All,

I thought some of you might find Catalog - which can be considered as an alternative to the Calibre - worth a try, in particular as it is currently "native" to the iLiad and therefore I post it here on this forum.

• UI-wise Catalog's approach is different from the Calibre (and to my taste) more handy, but on the other hand it's not as rich in features, as e.g. there's no conversion of files into any other formats.
  The idea of the user-interface is to show a list of all authors, and for a selected author the list of titles and if one title's been selected the respective details (see shot_1.tiff).
• The lists are sorted alphabetically - not a great deal but worth mentioning is that for the titles the sorting takes the 'Series' into account (by internally prepending the series to the actual 'Title'. This will guarantee that the books of a particlar series are shown together.
• If you hit 'eBook' you are prompted for the path to where the selected book is to be copied. Having entered a path the book's file and the image will be copied to that location and a corresponding manifest.xml will be created.
• Catalog is multi-lingual (though currently multi is actually bi), where the default language is English and German is the alternative. This can be changed in two ways, either by passing -lang <lang> on the command line, or by adding line "lang: <lang>" to .Catatlogrc which is created in your home-directory.
• If you have a Mac in front of you, you can see the 'Open' button which will open the current document - at least most often -

I wrote Catalog in java and bundled it into a jar-file (that should be executable on any OS) but the upload tool doesn't accept jars and therefore I had to zip it. I also attached the sources as 'Catalog.tar.gz'.

And of course, Catalog is free software. And of course, there's no warrenty whatsoever.

If you find a bug or want a feature be added, please let me know (I'll be also pleased, if you just want to tell me you like it )

Best regards,
Tommy

[serpentium]

Originally Posted by Tommy

Hi All,

I thought some of you might find Catalog - which can be considered as an alternative to the Calibre - worth a try, in particular as it is currently "native" to the iLiad and therefore I post it here on this forum.

How is native?

anyway i m interested in use this if will recognize title-author by ebook filename...

[ericshliao]

From the screen shot, I think the UI is quite simle and clean. I like it.

Which version of JRE is required? If the app runs on JVM 1.3, and it (typo. I mean "without") fancy widget class (such as Swing), it might be runnable on iLiad.

[Tommy]

Originally Posted by serpentium

How is native?

Native in this context means, I know it works for my iLiad. As I don't know if what what the Sony needs (e.g. an iLiad manifest.xml would be rather pointless) in addition to the actual book.

If someone told me what the Sony or any other device needs, I guess it wouldn't be a big deal to adapt Catalog to serve those gadgets as well.

anyway i m interested in use this if will recognize title-author by ebook filename...

Hmm... I don't know if I understand this question correctly From what you wrote it seems as if you expect Catalog to swallow an ebook file and figure out author and title etc. autmagically. This, however, is not the way it works, tough. As soon as you hit the 'New' button you'll have to enter everything you want to see for the book.

On the other hand, I do have a hack the does something like that. It's also a java program (a true command-line tool). As input parameter you have to specify a file into which the output of an 'ls'. If you want to use this program, you'll probably have to adapt it to your needs as it relies heavily on some naming convention.
If you want to have a look, you'll find it attched.

Best regards,
Tommy

[Tommy]

Originally Posted by ericshliao

From the screen shot, I think the UI is quite simle and clean. I like it.

Thanks! My paradigm is

Let Simplicity Rule

Which version of JRE is required? If the app runs on JVM 1.3, and it fancy widget class (such as Swing), it might be runnable on iLiad.

On my box a JRE 1.5 is running. But I don't know if I use some swing-features that are yet not part of 1.3...
If you get it running on your iLiad, I'd be really curious to see some screen shots...

Regards,
Tommy

[kovidgoyal]

While I dont want to discourage you from developing your own app, you can achieve the same browsing behavior (among many others) in calibre, as shown in the attached screenshot.

[Tommy]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

While I dont want to discourage you from developing your own app, you can achieve the same browsing behavior (among many others) in calibre, as shown in the attached screenshot.

I guessed I'd get some reply from you sooner or later
When I played around with calibre (actually only yesterday for a couple of minutes...) I hadn't figuered that out, so my fault. When I started with my app, I hadn't been aware of calibre, so I wrote it from scratch and with only my needs in mind. Then, I thought, this thingy might be of some interest to others as well and posted it.

And by the way, I think calibre is the mightier one and Catalog is no match (yet?).
But I haven't figured out how to feed my iLiad with it.

Regards,
Tommy

[kovidgoyal]

No problem, feel free to develop your own software, calibre cant be the best at everything

[Tommy]

Greetings,

for what it's worth, I've just added another feature to Catalog: It's now possible perform searches.
Hitting the Find button will show another input field. All the books in the catalog are checked against the input and only those which fulfil the search criteria will be shown.

• The syntax is
  key_1: value_1 (&|) key_2: value_2 ...
  where key_i is the key which is tested against value_i.
• Key and value are seperated by a colon (:).
• Key-value pairs can be concatenated by boolean AND (&) or by boolean OR (|).
• the keys are the fields that represent a book's properties, i.e.
  • Author,
  • Title,
  • Genre,
  • Series,
  • File or
  • Image.
  or their language dependant representations.
• it's not possible use parenthesis to group conditions. The conditions are evaluated strictly from left to right.

Example:

author: Nietsche | author: Platon

will display all those books which have author Nietsche or Platon.

author: Doyle & genre: Adventure

will display all those works of author Doyle (Arthur Conan) that have been categorized as Adventure. E.g. "The Lost World" could match (as opposed to the Holmes stories which would be Crime, wouldn't they?).

If you have any comments, complaints, ... please let me know.

Regards,
Tommy

[Tommy]

Hi,

another update... with further new features:

• Drag & Drop is now supported: If one drops one (or several) file(s) on one of the lists, it(they) will be added (as if one had pressed the 'New' button). In case of several files a dialog will be shown to prompt the user whether the given file should be accepted or not.
  
• Meta-data: In case of D'n'D before adding the book(s) an attempt to pull the author and the title from the file(s) is made. Files with suffixes
  • pdf,
  • html,
  • mobi or
  • lit
  are actually parsed (in some crude way) to obtain the information.
  For other files some some heuristic is applied to pull the information from the filename itself:
  • Author: it is assumed that the directory containing the given file is the author's name.
  • Title: everything left from the last '.' of the filename up to either dash or slash (or backslash for OSs of a certain manufacturer (from Redmond)) is used as title.
  • Series: the text between the two right-most dashes is taken as the series to which this book belongs to.
• File-conversion: A 'Convert' button has been added which allows to to convert files from some formats into some others. Currently the rules are hard-wired (according to my needs):
  • txt -> pdf: this is done by means of a perl-script (txt2html.pl) I attached and that has to be located in Catalog/bin .
  • html -> tex: this is done by means of another perl-script (html2latex by Peter Thatcher) I attached as well.
  • tex -> pdf: this is done using pdflatex (this means that users of certain OSs of a particular software manufacturer are screwed unless cygwin saves their day; any other Unixish OS shouldn't have a problem)
  • rtf -> html: here, a binary (rtf2html by Chuck Shotton and Dmitry Potapov) is used. If you want to this feature and don't have a Mac you'll have to compile it first and copy this new binary to Catalog/bin.
  • lit: expands the reader file into a directory using the famous clit (by Dan A. Jackson).

Catalog itself is now shipped in a zipped tarball that contains directory 'Catalog' and the jar-file itself and there is a sub-directory with all helper-programs mentioned above.

If you want to use html2latex.pl you'll first have install perl-module as described in its README.

Even if I repeat me, if you want to use rtf2html you'll probably have to compile it first. In most cases a simple 'make' should do the job.

The same holds for clit, the executable coming with this tarball is the one for the Mac, any other OS will have to replace this by the correct OS-dependant incarnation.

And now some words on txt2html.pl: This is a hack I wrote quite some time ago. It has two major modes: text-converions into html or into latex. Catalog uses this latter option and I have things set up such that when txt2html.pl is called a PDF for the Iliad is created. In txt2html's config-file there is a reference to a latex-style file (iliad.sty) that holds the settings I want to have for my eBooks.

Should anyone want to have support for mobi-conversion, just drop me a line. In the meantime I have mobiperl installed and running, although I don't use it (latex produces the better output on the Iliad).
Or if you want to use Catalog with your device, please let me know.

I attached (hopefully) all the files needed to get things running, if not please yell.

Regards,
Tommy

[Tommy]

Hi,

past time for another update

I don't exactly know all the changes since the last update, so I'll list only the most important ones.

• It's now possible to open and view eBooks if an appropriate viewer has been customized.
• The conversion has been generalized such that the user can customize which program is to be used to convert some format A to B.
• The documentation can be called from menu. Currently only two languages are supported (as the program itself) English and German
• The Drag'n'Drop capabilities have been extended.

Should anyone be interesed in the sources, just drop a line and I'll post them here. The same holds for the languages, if you want to translate the prgramm and/or the documentation, here is the spot to give me a shout.

I'm also planning to further generalize Catalog for other eBook readers, in particular I'd be interested to provide some plug-in for the Sony...

Have fun!
Tommy

[PhRex]

Sorry, but are calibre and catalog compatible with Windows or only with Linux?

[JSWolf]

Calibre is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux.