Calibre to add Apple iPad Output Profile?

[manutd]

Hello,

First of all, I want to say thank you to those individuals who created and continue to support Calibre. What a fantastic product!

Anyway, I apologize in advance if someone has already asked this question (I did my best to search the forums before posting), but I recently purchased an iPad and was wondering if Calibre plans to eventually include an "Output Profile" for iPad? To avoid having to manually format file conversions, such an addition would be extremely convenient.

Dave

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by manutd

I recently purchased an iPad and was wondering if Calibre plans to eventually include an "Output Profile" for iPad? To avoid having to manually format file conversions, such an addition would be extremely convenient.

I understand that iPad will support EPUB. Can you confirm? The two possible options for getting content onto it are:

1) shared folder via send to device/save to disk
2) content server via the browser on the iPad

Can you confirm if the iPad exposes itself as a USB disk? That's how Calibre supports option 1 above.

[3-Pack]

I don't think Dave is asking about file transfer, but rather about file conversion. Calibre's conversion preferences (under page setup) allow the user to optimize conversions for a number of different input and output devices. It would indeed be nice if the iPad could be listed among the output profiles.

[manutd]

That's correct, 3-Pack. I'm more interested in finding out whether there will be an output profile optimized for iPad...

[kovidgoyal]

You should be fine with the SONY output profile, since books on the iPad will be viewable at multiple screen resolutions in different reader apps, it's not really worth making a dedicated profile.

[manutd]

Thanks for the quick response and, again, for Calibre!

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You should be fine with the SONY output profile, since books on the iPad will be viewable at multiple screen resolutions in different reader apps, it's not really worth making a dedicated profile.

However, the dedicated resolution is 1024x768. Would be a waste not to make optimal use of it.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by 3-Pack

I don't think Dave is asking about file transfer, but rather about file conversion. Calibre's conversion preferences (under page setup) allow the user to optimize conversions for a number of different input and output devices. It would indeed be nice if the iPad could be listed among the output profiles.

Aha. I just don't do very many conversions, so I'm not familiar with conversion prefs. I tend to read in whatever format I have available. I have lots of reader programs for the WinMo devices my wife and I read on, and each supports several ebook formats. Couple that with the fact that my readers aren't considered e-readers by Calibre, so I never use the Send to Device, and don't have any default output profile, so I seldom think about them.

[skestes]

Originally Posted by athlonkmf

However, the dedicated resolution is 1024x768. Would be a waste not to make optimal use of it.

But in the case of the iPad the total resolution available to the actual text is not 1024x768 given the 'flair' that iBooks applies.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by skestes

But in the case of the iPad the total resolution available to the actual text is not 1024x768 given the 'flair' that iBooks applies.

Yes, this is also why I have refrained. Hopefully iBooks auto resizes pictures greater than the screen size (unlike ADE) then we can just use a 1024x768 profile.

[sartori]

Another vote here for a specific iPad epub export profile.

In this thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...249#post854249 I added info for including the cover image and metadata in a way that iTunes expects (and hopefully the iBooks app)

Would be great if Calibre exported these files into the epub for you.

[striders]

I tried to convert a 68 Mb book to EPUB format using the Sony Reader profile (900, then 300, then normal). The converted book can be copied to iTunes and sync'ed to my iPad.

But when opened with iBook within iPad, the iBook just hang, nothing happen. So converted book seems to crash iBook.

Any ideas?

UPDATE:
I figure it out. Apparently, if my PDF file have lots of pages, it takes a LONG time for iBook to display the ebook (1-5 minutes). But afterwards, subsequent load is much faster. So maybe it's an iBook thing, given that it's on version 1.0 only.

[zonule]

I've been working on a related problem all day, without sucess.

First some background: I've been using Calibre to organize a large number of books that were converted to EPUB from RTF. They look great on the Sony PRS505. Using Stanza on the iPhone, they also look great ONLY IF you change a particular setting in Stanza (change settings > layout > display style to "off"). If you don't do this, only the first page of the book is shown. The remaining pages, perhaps hundreds of them, are blank. On my shiny new iPad, the same fix is necessary. (Stanza needs an update for iPad - the print is blurry in full screen mode.)

Now here is my question. While waiting for an iPad-compatible Stanza, I've been using the iPad's iBook program, which supposedly reads EPUBs. This it does, as long as they are not generated by Calibre. If they are, you get the same "first page only" error. What's going on. Is there some conversion setting that will generate EPUBs that don't have this problem?

By the way, Calibre is a great program. I like it a lot.

[kovidgoyal]

Amazing that both Stanza and iBooks share the same bug
Open a ticket and attach one of your RTF files and I'll see if I can find a fix.

[Eric Lindsay]

For web pages, Apple suggest using the following meta tags to the head of your html. They should be harmless elsewhere, and would probably also work on an iPad, since it uses WebKit.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
<meta name="viewport" content="height=device-height" />