Editor as Stand alone
 

Is it possible to just load Calibre Editor on a PC ?
It would be useful to have the ability to edit epubs on a couple of other PCs on our Network.
It is not necessary for these machines to have all of Calibre as they would simply be given a document to edit and then the resulting epub would be imported into the machine running Calibre. (as the books are on a NAS drive, I do not want them being accessed by "other Calibres" ) and they don't need the full software overhead.

Yes, you can just run the editor as standalone (from your start screen).

Under Windows it would typically be:

"C:\Program Files\Calibre2\ebook-edit.exe"

But I think the whole program has to be installed to get the editor, since it relies on parts of the whole program.

No. The whole program needs to be installed.

Thank you for Good answers, even if not quite what I wanted....
Any chance of at some stage allowing a smaller "Calibre e-edit download as a split out??

Probably not. I have heard of no intentions from Kovid about that. Than again, Calibre is still the best e-book library management application.

Only edit-book - I don't think so, and even if it were to happen the small version wouldn't be that much smaller anyway as it uses a lot of the same libs and resources etc.

Just install calibre, but remove any shortcuts for the main executable, and add one (if needed) for the edit-book executable.

Kovid has addressed this for Edit Book, Ebook Convert, Content Server and Ebook Viewer and has stated that splitting them out as their own install will not happen. Creating a single calibre package for three different operating systems each week is his limit.

It would be highly duplicative, since he would have to update libs and changes in however many different programs.

After installing calibre delete the calibre.exe file that way they wont be able to run calibre but edit book should work fine for as IIRC edit book does not need it to run

Maybe use the portable version of calibre on Windows and pare it down?

It uses the exact same executables. Plus an extra one, to set the variables for appdata, default library, etc. before calling the main executable.

Bottom line is, you can pare down calibre only if you are willing to get messy with the source code.

But this shouldn't be a problem unless your hard drive cannot afford to hold a few dozen megabytes of extra dlls that you will never see or use. And if so, you have other problems.

Stick with ebook-edit.exe and don't use the library functions. You can even delete the other .exes and shortcut files, if they really bother you -- that will really stop you from using them.

I agree. Don't see what the problem is.

One problem with cutting out unused components, to create yourself an editor only version. is that the editor is a fast moving target, so you would probably want to do it every week.

Also there's no guarantee that a component that wasn't needed by the editor last week won't be needed next week, or that Kovid won't wheel in a few extra components the week after - eg dictionaries.

If you want to control what executables users can and can't use then on Windows you would use the local group policy editor (LGPE) feature, there are settings for can and can't use. I assume OS/X and Lunix would have something similar.

BR