Quote:
Originally Posted by HailCardassia
I thought if Calibre renamed the files and I made hardlinks, or symlinks, of the original files I could point Calibre to the duplicate directory and let it rename those without changing the original files or doubling its size.
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Calibre's not going to do any of that for you, but you could do in manually. I did an experiment using Win10 1703, out of the box calibre
portable, the xplorer˛ file manager, and
Hermann Shinagl's LSE gadget.
I chose Mary Wollestenecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" deliberately, because I knew it would introduce the issue of calibre's truncation rules.
First up I used the Add empty book tool to create a book record and an empty epub, here you see the book list and the book folder:
Then I went to where I had the original epub and right button dragged it into the book folder and selected LSE's
Create Symbolic Link Here option
Here you see the result
Next I copied the calibre truncated name of the empty epub to the clipboard, and then deleted the empty epub, then I renamed the symlink to the calibre truncated name - here's the result
And here the book is loaded into the viewer via the symlink.
I was also able to use the tool in Metadata edit to extract the cover image from the epub into the book folder. When I tried to edit the book the editor crashed. That's all I tried - which is barely scratching calibre's surface
So what you want can be done, after a fashion, but you will have to do it and sort out any problems when something doesn't work or when a symlink is invalidated because the target was moved or renamed etc etc.
BR