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kiwidude · 06-12-2012, 06:14 PM

The stuff I remember struggling with the most when starting:

getting calibre to sort alphabetically on screen (the ",the" etc title sort suffixes defaults threw me until I discovered tweaks to stop it)
getting authors as LN, FN so my brain didn't explode - spent way too much time on this and several forum queries before chaley sorted me out. Probably the biggest frustration I had (and I see other users continuing to have) - sorts at author and book level being different and making authors not appear next to each other. I'm sure this will get properly improved one day.
getting title and author the right way around when adding books leading to discovering it being regex based (and hunting down a regex in the forums to cope with optional series in the title)
getting books onto my Kindle with series information / ordering (figuring out metadata plugboards). I even requested someone write a step by step which a kind soul did on a wiki which was invaluable.
figuring out where all the random tags were coming from, and stopping them doing that to have a rationalised subset that (mostly) are basic genres
wondering why I had weird covers for my books like short stories that were an image of the text (another reason to turn off getting metadata when adding)
doing metadata downloads in bulk (before I learned better!) and having titles/authors being replaced with seemingly random capitalisation/titles (no longer have overwrite title/authors enabled, and IIRC Kovid recapitalises since 0.8)
wondering why my device only sometimes showed as being connected in calibre (having my smartphone plugged in to charge via USB stops a Kindle being detected)
performance issues with a large library. It coincided with chaley & Kovid also doing a lot of performance tuning with feedback to chaley in particular and things dramatically improved. Also led to me choosing to have multiple libraries, and not doing my cleanup work in the large library.
why my epub timestamps kept changing even though I wasnt doing anything to them. Eventually discovered it was the ebook viewer with its bookmark files so that got turned off darned quick.
dealing with duplicates and merging them - something that has been dramatically improved since I started with automerge & of course my Find Duplicates plugin. I don't think it is the complete solution as yet, but it is way better than it used to be!
I personally didn't get confused by it but I must have answered in the forums 50 times at least why buttons disappear from the toolbar when devices get plugged in.

I think my wishlist for new users (which has been discussed elsewhere, but I am repeating for Becca only) would be:

Making it easier out of the box to get their books onto a Kindle sorted how they like, without them having to come to the forums and learn what a "metadata plugboard" is.
Making it easier to change from FN LN to LN, FN and changing other default sort settings without learning about tweaks, manage authors etc. We don't all think like a librarian
That more users would be encouraged to learn about "plugins" and their benefits, rather than the relatively tiny minority that visit MobileRead. I can't imagine using calibre without some of my plugins, or certainly I wouldn't have committed to putting so much effort into my calibre collection I maintain within it without them. I think my Kindle probably shares equal credit for rekindling my interest (excuse the pun) in reading voraciously again.

In terms of the UI changes, my custom columns from memory are a yes/no for whether I have read, a last date read (not visible), a yes/no for whether I have linked a book to Goodreads, a yes/no for whether a book is retail, a yes/no for whether I have sent the book to my parents, a word count and page count column, and a formats column. Standard columns I turn off are Size, Date, Publisher, Modified, Languages. I always have the book details visible, rarely use the cover browser and only use the tag browser if I am looking at a couple of user categories I have setup (fairly rare now too).

In terms of conversion defaults, I set justification to full, turn off all header splitting, and set a css style for paragraph tags to set a top/bottom margin of 0.2em and indent of 1em. Though mostly I end up using Sigil via a keyboard shortcut and the Open With plugin to tune style issues with conversions. If you instead meant customizing the ebook viewer, other than turning off bookmarks I haven't touched it - I only use it to preview a few pages of a book for comparisons of which version to keep, not to actually read books in. I do use Microsoft's LIT reader for LIT files rather than calibre's viewer since it is faster and renders natively.

Obviously I wouldn't have spent thousands of hours writing plugins/calibre contributions and supporting in the forums if I didn't think it was an outstanding program. We have had numerous debates in the forums about the learning curve of calibre, I'm not going to rehash the debate here. Hopefully some of the non-technical users can share on this thread for you - for my parents I set it up for them with explicit instructions/subset of functionality and while they don't have any ambitions or needs outside of those they are pretty much "support free" since then.

Hope that was along the lines of what you asked for?

06-12-2012, 06:14 PM	#6
kiwidude Calibre Plugins Developer Posts: 4,732 Karma: 2197770 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Australia Device: Kindle Oasis	The stuff I remember struggling with the most when starting: getting calibre to sort alphabetically on screen (the ",the" etc title sort suffixes defaults threw me until I discovered tweaks to stop it) getting authors as LN, FN so my brain didn't explode - spent way too much time on this and several forum queries before chaley sorted me out. Probably the biggest frustration I had (and I see other users continuing to have) - sorts at author and book level being different and making authors not appear next to each other. I'm sure this will get properly improved one day. getting title and author the right way around when adding books leading to discovering it being regex based (and hunting down a regex in the forums to cope with optional series in the title) getting books onto my Kindle with series information / ordering (figuring out metadata plugboards). I even requested someone write a step by step which a kind soul did on a wiki which was invaluable. figuring out where all the random tags were coming from, and stopping them doing that to have a rationalised subset that (mostly) are basic genres wondering why I had weird covers for my books like short stories that were an image of the text (another reason to turn off getting metadata when adding) doing metadata downloads in bulk (before I learned better!) and having titles/authors being replaced with seemingly random capitalisation/titles (no longer have overwrite title/authors enabled, and IIRC Kovid recapitalises since 0.8) wondering why my device only sometimes showed as being connected in calibre (having my smartphone plugged in to charge via USB stops a Kindle being detected) performance issues with a large library. It coincided with chaley & Kovid also doing a lot of performance tuning with feedback to chaley in particular and things dramatically improved. Also led to me choosing to have multiple libraries, and not doing my cleanup work in the large library. why my epub timestamps kept changing even though I wasnt doing anything to them. Eventually discovered it was the ebook viewer with its bookmark files so that got turned off darned quick. dealing with duplicates and merging them - something that has been dramatically improved since I started with automerge & of course my Find Duplicates plugin. I don't think it is the complete solution as yet, but it is way better than it used to be! I personally didn't get confused by it but I must have answered in the forums 50 times at least why buttons disappear from the toolbar when devices get plugged in. I think my wishlist for new users (which has been discussed elsewhere, but I am repeating for Becca only) would be: Making it easier out of the box to get their books onto a Kindle sorted how they like, without them having to come to the forums and learn what a "metadata plugboard" is. Making it easier to change from FN LN to LN, FN and changing other default sort settings without learning about tweaks, manage authors etc. We don't all think like a librarian That more users would be encouraged to learn about "plugins" and their benefits, rather than the relatively tiny minority that visit MobileRead. I can't imagine using calibre without some of my plugins, or certainly I wouldn't have committed to putting so much effort into my calibre collection I maintain within it without them. I think my Kindle probably shares equal credit for rekindling my interest (excuse the pun) in reading voraciously again. In terms of the UI changes, my custom columns from memory are a yes/no for whether I have read, a last date read (not visible), a yes/no for whether I have linked a book to Goodreads, a yes/no for whether a book is retail, a yes/no for whether I have sent the book to my parents, a word count and page count column, and a formats column. Standard columns I turn off are Size, Date, Publisher, Modified, Languages. I always have the book details visible, rarely use the cover browser and only use the tag browser if I am looking at a couple of user categories I have setup (fairly rare now too). In terms of conversion defaults, I set justification to full, turn off all header splitting, and set a css style for paragraph tags to set a top/bottom margin of 0.2em and indent of 1em. Though mostly I end up using Sigil via a keyboard shortcut and the Open With plugin to tune style issues with conversions. If you instead meant customizing the ebook viewer, other than turning off bookmarks I haven't touched it - I only use it to preview a few pages of a book for comparisons of which version to keep, not to actually read books in. I do use Microsoft's LIT reader for LIT files rather than calibre's viewer since it is faster and renders natively. Obviously I wouldn't have spent thousands of hours writing plugins/calibre contributions and supporting in the forums if I didn't think it was an outstanding program. We have had numerous debates in the forums about the learning curve of calibre, I'm not going to rehash the debate here. Hopefully some of the non-technical users can share on this thread for you - for my parents I set it up for them with explicit instructions/subset of functionality and while they don't have any ambitions or needs outside of those they are pretty much "support free" since then. Hope that was along the lines of what you asked for?