Minor Calibre issues

[starrigger]

Here's another minor issue--or maybe it's just a question. Another writer sent me her manuscript to read in RTF format, and I didn't like the way my PRS700 displayed it in terms of font size and spacing, so I converted it to EPUB. That made it much more readable in terms of font, but all the vertical (blank) line spacing disappeared, so chapters are squished together, etc. It's okay for my immediate purpose, but I wonder why it happened.

I've encountered the same problem in Mobi Creator with my own files, but not to such an extreme.

[kovidgoyal]

RTF is a really bad format for e-books. You have to customize the conversion process for it. Basically that means you have to put in an XPath expression to detect chapters. Unfortunately there's no simple prescription for that, it depends on the individual RTF file.

[starrigger]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

RTF is a really bad format for e-books. You have to customize the conversion process for it. Basically that means you have to put in an XPath expression to detect chapters. Unfortunately there's no simple prescription for that, it depends on the individual RTF file.

Hm. But aside from chapter detection, why do blank line spaces disappear? Why don't they get converted to something like html <br><br> tags?

I had the same problem when I used Mobi Creator to make .prc files from html source files. And when I when I used Framemaker to make tagged PDF files from Word docs. Never did reliably solve the problem.

[kovidgoyal]

Dunno I'd have to see the RTF to answer that

[itimpi]

Unfortunately it looks as though the change to correct the Add Books dialog not hiding itself on Windows has only partly worked in 0.4.135!

The dialog now correctly updates itself at the different stages of the add process, but has still does not disappear at the end (on my system) although it had been doing so in my original testing of the patch submitted. It could also be due to small differences between my test/development environment and my normal "production" system which ahs no development tools installed. I wonder if there needs to be yet more calls to QApplication.processEvents() ? Perhaps in the main loop where the books are being added.

In fact, on my system at least, the adding process is quite slow so perhaps I should look at having a progress dialog displaying details of each book as it is added like it does when reading the metadata. If nothing else it would be a better progress indicator. Can you see an issues with doing that? I guess there might be an issue if the next level down is not meant to have normal gui access?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by itimpi

Unfortunately it looks as though the change to correct the Add Books dialog not hiding itself on Windows has only partly worked in 0.4.135!

The dialog now correctly updates itself at the different stages of the add process, but has still does not disappear at the end (on my system) although it had been doing so in my original testing of the patch submitted. It could also be due to small differences between my test/development environment and my normal "production" system which ahs no development tools installed. I wonder if there needs to be yet more calls to QApplication.processEvents() ? Perhaps in the main loop where the books are being added.

In fact, on my system at least, the adding process is quite slow so perhaps I should look at having a progress dialog displaying details of each book as it is added like it does when reading the metadata. If nothing else it would be a better progress indicator. Can you see an issues with doing that? I guess there might be an issue if the next level down is not meant to have normal gui access?

Hmm I'm just going to refactor it to be in a separate thread. That should put an end to these issues once and for all.