Quote:
Originally Posted by user_none
As for the idea of having to know regexes, too bad. The features that use them require them. There is no way around it. If you don't know how to write a regex for that feature then don't use it. Sorry but many of the features like search and replace cannot be acomplished in any other way that would be simplier and cover as many use cases.
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Which is why I barely use Calibre, and mostly for conversions to something I can open in Word and reformat to reader-sized PDFs. I don't know regex, and the tutorials assume a level and type of geekery I don't have.
I love Calibre and encourage lots of people to use it; I barely touch it myself because the learning curve is steep enough to be frustrating, and my doc conversion skills in other programs make it not worth the effort.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
The first two lines from the wikipedia article on regular expressions (emphasis mine)
Regular expression
In computing, a regular expression, also referred to as regex or regexp, provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification. |
My eyes glazed over at "strings of text."
I'm vaguely aware that "regex" is High Geek for "search function," and is more powerful & versatile than just calling it search-and-replace. That doesn't make the explanation make any more sense to me. I can follow it if I concentrate very hard, and translate about half the words individually, but that's not the same as "read and understand."
Text, for me, is made of
words. Or letters. Not "strings." When I think about it, I realize why the term "strings" is used; "words" and "characters" aren't specific and accurate enough. But that doesn't change the fact that an explanation of a geek term written in other geek terms is still opaque. I get that simplifying the explanation, or using layman's terms for the details, would be inaccurate; that doesn't make it any easier to understand.
There is probably no simple solution for this, just a need for patience all around.
Someone (who is fluent in the Calibre subdialect of Geek, and has ridiculous amounts of spare time & goodwill toward their fellow ebook readers) might consider putting together a small collection of tutorials in common newbie topics, like "How To Make Collections" or " or "How To Make Chapter Headings," that being the hurdle that's caused me to mostly give up on it. (I got instructions. I attempted to follow them. The results did not have chapter headings, or did not have page breaks before chapter breaks, and I shrugged and went back to making custom-sized PDFs with bookmarks.)