iPad is Superior to Android for Importing Calibre-Organized PDF's (Show Me I'm Wrong)

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Madmick

Why should I need to contact anyone when I can simply edit the metadata in Calibre myself? Why aren't any of these reader apps recognizing Calibre metadata for PDF's? Why only EPUBS?

I asked that question myself to the Calibre crew. It appears that some PDFs will update, others won't. Which is why I make my own PDFs, where metadata is always correctly set.

[Madmick]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I asked that question myself to the Calibre crew. It appears that some PDFs will update, others won't. Which is why I make my own PDFs, where metadata is always correctly set.

Aha. Sounds like you're the man I'm looking for.

Can I create my own PDF with a pre-existing PDF so that all the content is the same, but I have the ability to reconstruct the metadata from scratch? How do I do this?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Madmick

Aha. Sounds like you're the man I'm looking for.

Can I create my own PDF with a pre-existing PDF so that all the content is the same, but I have the ability to reconstruct the metadata from scratch? How do I do this?

Why assume I'm male!

And sorry, I have no clue. I make my PDF's from a HTML base. I didn't like the epub implementation on my BeBook Mini and my PDA only read mobipocket. So, I needed a way to generate 3 formats from one source format. So, HTML to epub, mobipocket and PDF. Being a developer myself, I made a tool to format my HTML into LaTeX and from LaTeX I convert to PDF.

To edit PDF files themselves, there are some tools available, but most are rather expensive or hardly working...

[Madmick]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Why assume I'm male!

My bad. "Sweet Pea" should have tipped me off, LOL. It's a habit. The forum I moderate is 90%+ male. Now that you point it out: women are much more avid readers than men. I bet women outnumber men here.

To edit PDF files themselves, there are some tools available, but most are rather expensive or hardly working...

Damn, well, I guess I've got some experimenting to do. A quick Google turned up this thread from Mobileread's own forums:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42028

And this one from another forum:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

Anyways, I got some leads. So thanks to everyone for pointing me in the right direction.

[=X=]

There was a program called soPDF here on the forums that edited the Meta data from the command line. There is another app, I believe in Java but I forget the name of it.

I had written a script file that updated the Meta data based on the file name. It had a batch feature that converted all the files.

Personally I think you're doing it wrong. I mean what a pain to have to copy every file over to each device you use. You lose the power of calibre's file management as well. There is nothing easier and more powerful than using calibre's ODPS web server. Simply point your device to the web page and search for the file using calibre's search engine and tag based system. Once found download the book to whatever device you want, be it Android, kindle,nook, iPod, iPad,etc....


Montano and Moon+ integrate odps web severs very nicely to their products.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by =X=

There was a program called soPDF here on the forums that edited the Meta data from the command line. There is another app, I believe in Java but I forget the name of it.

I had written a script file that updated the Meta data based on the file name. It had a batch feature that converted all the files.

Personally I think you're doing it wrong. I mean what a pain to have to copy every file over to each device you use. You lose the power of calibre's file management as well. There is nothing easier and more powerful than using calibre's ODPS web server. Simply point your device to the web page and search for the file using calibre's search engine and tag based system. Once found download the book to whatever device you want, be it Android, kindle,nook, iPod, iPad,etc....


Montano and Moon+ integrate odps web severs very nicely to their products.

As I keep version information in the filename, I prefer Calibre to update my Flyer. Also, ODPS requires me to log in my server to update the catalog and the last time I tried to connect Mantano, it wouldn't open the list due to the password protection.

[Madmick]

Originally Posted by =X=

There was a program called soPDF here on the forums that edited the Meta data from the command line. There is another app, I believe in Java but I forget the name of it.

I had written a script file that updated the Meta data based on the file name. It had a batch feature that converted all the files.

Is there a way for me to download your script? I've never taken on scripts; I don't know much about them or what they would be useful for. But if you have a script command that would automatically read the author/title from Calibre's library and copy that info into this "soPDF" program's metadata-editor for every PDF in my Calibre library, then you would save me dozens and dozens of hours of work.

Personally I think you're doing it wrong. I mean what a pain to have to copy every file over to each device you use. You lose the power of calibre's file management as well. There is nothing easier and more powerful than using calibre's ODPS web server. Simply point your device to the web page and search for the file using calibre's search engine and tag based system. Once found download the book to whatever device you want, be it Android, kindle,nook, iPod, iPad,etc....

Montano and Moon+ integrate odps web severs very nicely to their products.

I've run Calibre's Content Server and accessed all my files using Aldiko since that was the first reader I downloaded (I haven't tried yet with any others that are OPDS-enabled). Like Sweet Pea, for whatever reason, when I tried to implement a password, I couldn't access the catalog with Aldiko. It only worked when I didn't password-protect the Content Server.

Just to be clear, since I'm a newbie to this stuff, when I say "Calibre Content Server" and you say "Calibre OPDS Web Server", we're talking about the same thing, right? You go to "Calibre > Preferences > Sharing Over the Net" and then hit "Start Server" and leave that server running. Then I use Aldiko (or whatever reader) to go to the url "192.168.1.x:8080". This is what we're talking about when we're talking about OPDS, correct? I'm simply turning my personal Calibre library into an OPDS catalog.

The problem is that this doesn't address the root of the problem: that most of my several thousand PDFs' metadata aren't properly organized. Also, as I said earlier, I very much want access to my library when I'm offline or don't have access to WiFi. I live in cattle country. Very few businesses are WiFi-enabled. So unless I only want to read at home, then I need these eBooks stored locally.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Madmick

Is there a way for me to download your script? I've never taken on scripts; I don't know much about them or what they would be useful for. But if you have a script command that would automatically read the author/title from Calibre's library and copy that info into this "soPDF" program's metadata-editor for every PDF in my Calibre library, then you would save me dozens and dozens of hours of work.

I've uploaded it here but I don't know how much it will help you. This script was specifically written for my needs. To update the metadata of a pdf and crop it for my kindle/sony eInk device.

The script is not tied to calibre. It uses the file name to update the meta data and expects "Author - Book title". It's a start you can modify the script to your needs. Also the script was written in Perl. If you want to update it to use pdftk modify the script where it has the "system(soPDF" to use pdftk. You'll also have to modify the parameters.

In the past Calibre did not modify the PDF, but later versions it adopted pdftk as part of the build and now updates the meta data of the PDF. So as long as you update the PDF in calibre the pdf file will be updated as well.

Originally Posted by Madmick

Just to be clear, since I'm a newbie to this stuff, when I say "Calibre Content Server" and you say "Calibre OPDS Web Server",

Yes that is what I mean.

Originally Posted by Madmick

The problem is that this doesn't address the root of the problem: that most of my several thousand PDFs' metadata aren't properly organized. Also, as I said earlier, I very much want access to my library when I'm offline or don't have access to WiFi. I live in cattle country. Very few businesses are WiFi-enabled. So unless I only want to read at home, then I need these eBooks stored locally.

I use to be obsessive about having my whole library on my SONY PRS-505/Kindle but then I came back to reality. How many books can I read at once. I typically have 3-5 books going on at the same time and don't read a different book until I'm done. Some books take a week to finish others take months.

How many books to you read an hour several hundred? Probably not all one really needs on their reader really is just a few books instead of their whole book collection. But that is just me and the conclusion I came to. Managing books and the performance of apps is much better with less books on the device.

Also ezPDF is a great PDF reader, personally I like reading PDF on that app much more than on Montano. RepliGo and ezPDF are also the only apps that have the ability to annotate PDF using the PDF standard.

My opinion is ezPDF is a better reading app, however RepliGO is better at annotating, looking up annotations and reading image based images.

=X=

[Madmick]

Originally Posted by =X=

In the past Calibre did not modify the PDF, but later versions it adopted pdftk as part of the build and now updates the meta data of the PDF. So as long as you update the PDF in calibre the pdf file will be updated as well.

I used Calibre 0.8.28 or later to edit all these PDF's, and the metadata still isn't translating correctly to my Android readers like Mantano.

1) I don't want to risk corrupting files by attempting BBEdit usage through Terminal (don't want to spend the time making sure I know what I'm doing).
2) soPDF is only available as an .exe for Windows, and I don't want to go through the hassle of porting my entire library from my MacBook Pro to my crappy old backup Windows PC just to test this out.
3) Ergo, I tried editing the metadata in PDFInfo, and was optimistic because it only had several metadata fields to edit (including "author" and "title"), but when I imported these newly edited PDF's to Mantano, it just showed "ÿPa" for author and title of every PDF I test-edited.

Ughhh...I'm done. I've spent enough time trying to get these PDF's nice and neat. Instead, I'm just gonna create collections in Mantano for them, and sort them accordingly. That will make it easier to find them in the future. I can keep them separate from a MOBI/EPUB collection I'll create for my entire library in those formats that will show up and allow sorting neatly.

I use to be obsessive about having my whole library on my SONY PRS-505/Kindle but then I came back to reality. How many books can I read at once. I typically have 3-5 books going on at the same time and don't read a different book until I'm done. Some books take a week to finish others take months.

Yeah, I was slowly coming to that realization on my own. I do a lot of academic reading where I require cross-referencing, but realistically, I've narrowed down the list I absolutely want stored locally to about 700 books.

Also ezPDF is a great PDF reader, personally I like reading PDF on that app much more than on Montano. RepliGo and ezPDF are also the only apps that have the ability to annotate PDF using the PDF standard.

My opinion is ezPDF is a better reading app, however RepliGO is better at annotating, looking up annotations and reading image based images.

I might end up purchasing ezPDF, then. Most of my PDF's are nonfiction science-based stuff. For those, I create flow charts in separate applications (Microsoft Word on my comp) to create bullet points and footnotes for whichever text I'm reading. Mantano has this "Notes" thing going, so I think I'll try that out first.

It's typically fiction where I make a lot of in-column annotations (all my lit books from NYU are ruined with scribbling in the margins). Pretty much all my fiction is MOBI/EPUB, so I'm hoping Mantano will suffice for that.

For now, I've decided Mantano will be my default eReader. It's a badass app. My earliest critiques are:

1) I can't edit Author of unknown books individually. When I go to "Authors" in the left-hand column menu in the "My Bookshelf" tab: about half my PDF's show up in a folder labeled, "Show books without authors" and even checkboxing one-at-a-time before long pressing on this folder and editing won't allow separate changes to individual books in this folder. This is true for every field in this menu: Formats, Series, Languages, etc. Since the overwhelming majority of these books have different authors, this effectively cripples the feature; I can't edit the metadata.

2) I can't access the Calibre Content Server in the "My Feeds" section for OPDS catalogs. FB Reader and Coolreader won't access it, either. Right now, only Aldiko is working with this Calibre Content Server. So for that alone I'm retaining Aldiko.