Hello,
I saw a reccommendation for calibre on the internet, and thought I'd try it. This is my first experience and I haven't spent a lot of time with it, so forgive me if I am not understanding it or not aware of some settings.
I have a collection from gutenburg, and other sources which are usually .txt or .rtf or even .html. I don't have an ebook reader. I have a new book and I just needed something to display the text, but in a larger font size. I could select all and change the font, but I'd lose the nice chapter headers.
I tried Calibre. First I was dismayed that I had to set a place to store my books. I already have them nicely organized into directories, I would rather just index my existing files. Next, I wish you had an edit text box for the storage directory. I had my directory already open in windows and I like to just copy and paste from the address bar to the programs settings box. Unlike some people, I don't keep everything under My Documents and it takes a long time to click around to find my files.
Next issue, I wish I could import whole directories of my books. As the program stands now, I had to highlight all the files in just one directory. When importing, the title and author were randomly switched and I have no idea how this is picked up. In my case, the files were named as last, first - title - series#. I think it would be great to be given a sample 'parsing' and buttons to swap fields on import, and also when imported to just click to swap field order. I also have books stored as directory by author and then files as book titles. So there's a few things useful for importing.
The next issue was reading the books. I clicked on a book and Wordpad came up - I was surprised, I thought there would be a book reader included. This should never happen. It was an .rtf file.
I clicked another file in a real ebook format to try to trick the program into giving me a book viewer. Finally I discovered your book viewer! It's not obvious how to open it. I then looked for an open menu but there were no menus. I finally guessed at the right icon, but I didn't find it obvious. The open folder icon is normal for programs.
When I got the book open, the formatting was completely messed up. Quoted text was in smallcaps, things were randomly in smallcaps and also bolded. It looked quite plain in Wordpad, just bold chapter headers and plain body. The ends of lines were also cutoff and I couldn't find any way to fix this. There was no horizontal scrollbar. I need some way to read text even if you have to purposely break formatting. I can't read text by moving a horizontal scrollbar on each line, that would be exhausting after hours.
I thought I used something called fbreader on ubuntu and I just loved it, it worked for me right away and was simple to use. I don't think I can get it for windows, but since I just remembered the name I'll have to look again
I'm sure your program has many great features and works for a lot of people, but if you could make it easier for a beginner it would be even greater! Just something to consider.
For me, I'll just have to resize the font in Wordpad and get back to reading.