[davidfor]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

I'll get right on that!

I think we'll just call you "Bob".

More seriously, there's a bunch of new ideas, let's see if I caught them all:

New Book per Section vs per TOC

The existing 'per Section' feature requires you to have something in the TOC for each section, even if you have to add it in EpubSplit.

It seems reasonable to me to change that to a 'per TOC' feature that includes sections without TOC entries in the same book until the next TOC entry is reached, as per sweth. Anyone want to keep the existing 'per Section'?

Always Include Sections

Marking sections to 'always' include is a possibility. The difficult bit is figuring out the GUI for it.

Define Several Books, then Split

IMO, the difference in implementation complexity just isn't worth the added convenience in use.

The "always include" would go a long way to solve this for me. Part of the problem is creating multiple books in one session. I seem to spend all my time selecting the different parts and then messing up when I click in the wrong place. Selecting the common files and then just click and shift-click for each book would be good.

Multilevel TOC

Currently, EpubSplit ignores multilevel TOC entirely and just flattens it. Because it's a complex PITA to deal with.

But I agree that it would be nice to be able to include a TOC entry and get all its subs. I'll look at how Edit Book handles it and I might pick up some ideas.

Output TOC will almost certainly still be flattened, though.

You could rebuild the TOC. That will work for a lot of books. And it is one of the thing I do in my FFF post-processing plugin.

Edit Metadata

I'll consider making Edit Metadata optional, especially since 'per Section' already works that way.

Edit Metadata is used so that changes made are pushed into the epub right away as well as the Calibre DB. If it's left for the user to do later, they have to either explicitly use Polish or Modify Epub or trust Calibre to insert metadata as needed.

Trusting Calibre is not a bad thing, but one of the cases where it doesn't update the metadata is when you View the epub you just created. OTOH, that's the case any time you modifying metadata in Calibre...

As long as I've been using calibre I keep falling for that when I open a new book in the viewer to check it

Edit Book Plugin?

Instead of a User Interface plugin, would it be better if EpubSplit was an Edit Book plugin?

My first impulse is 'no'. Apart from the GUI parts, EpubSplit is standalone and can be used as a CLI script outside Calibre. To really take advantage of being in the Editor it would have to use more Calibre specific code.

I have been doing a few splits this way recently. Mainly because they have come as epub3 from Kobo and I want to maintain that. Epubsplit reduces them to epub2 which is fine for most books, but, I have a few that look better as epub3 and I can't be bothered working out the code to get the epub2 version working.

Plus, it doesn't look like Edit Book has access to the running library GUI DB to create new books, since it's a separate process.

True. The way around it would be saving outside calibre and calling the command-line to add it. But, I think just saving it and opening the directory to allow adding the book manually would be enough.

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

New Test Version

Contains changes from last post, plus adds a Preferences option for 'Edit Metadata'.

It defaults to off, but I also added confirmation dialogs (with 'show this again' checkboxes) to explain it.

It also means you will 'Edit Metadata' for 'Per Section' books if it's checked.

FYI, I've looked into multi-level TOC -- I don't think that's going to be happening in EpubSplit.

These look good. Pity I spent time last night splitting my latest omnibus. But, I'll find one to play with.