MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

kovidgoyal · 09-08-2019, 09:18 PM

Hi all,

Finally after almost a year of working on it, calibre 4 is mostly ready. The big change is the complete replacement of Qt WebKit with Qt WebEngine, as the former is no longer maintained. This means that various parts of calibre had to be re-written, including the viewer, the editor preview panel, PDF Output, the book details panel, the comments editor, the ToC editor, etc.

The biggest user visible change is in the viewer, which now shares a codebase with the in-browser viewer. It's interface has been changed to emphasize book text and not the controls/bars. I had hoped to add support for annotations, but it took me so long just to re-write all these parts of calibre, that I decided to release 4.0 first and work on adding annotations after 4.0. One nifty new feature in the viewer is the Lookup functionality, which works inside a side panel in the viewer. You open the panel and simply double click on any word to look it up in a dictionary or search engine.

The next big change is in the book details panel and comments editor which now use Qt's Rich Text widget rather than an actual browser to render comments. This means that the level of support for advanced HTML or CSS has decreased, but on the other hand resource usage has improved. I have tried to keep things as compatible as possible, but it is likely that if you use some types of advanced CSS in your comments it may not render as before.

In PDF output, the way the output is generated has been completely changed, however most things should just continue to work as before, with the exception of header and footer templates, which will need their HTML code to be adjusted slightly, details here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...rs-and-footers

Finally, you might notice that the size of the calibre downloads has approximately doubled, blame Qt WebEngine.

I would appreciate it if some of you would try the beta for a while and report any issues. It is perfectly safe to upgrade to the beta and then downgrade back to mainline releases, if you find problems. In particular, feedback on the new viewer would be useful since now is the time to make changes to it, before a public release.

Report issues in this thread, please.

Betas are available at: https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/

Thanks

09-08-2019, 09:18 PM	#1
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,590 Karma: 28548962 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Beta testing calibre 4 Hi all, Finally after almost a year of working on it, calibre 4 is mostly ready. The big change is the complete replacement of Qt WebKit with Qt WebEngine, as the former is no longer maintained. This means that various parts of calibre had to be re-written, including the viewer, the editor preview panel, PDF Output, the book details panel, the comments editor, the ToC editor, etc. The biggest user visible change is in the viewer, which now shares a codebase with the in-browser viewer. It's interface has been changed to emphasize book text and not the controls/bars. I had hoped to add support for annotations, but it took me so long just to re-write all these parts of calibre, that I decided to release 4.0 first and work on adding annotations after 4.0. One nifty new feature in the viewer is the Lookup functionality, which works inside a side panel in the viewer. You open the panel and simply double click on any word to look it up in a dictionary or search engine. The next big change is in the book details panel and comments editor which now use Qt's Rich Text widget rather than an actual browser to render comments. This means that the level of support for advanced HTML or CSS has decreased, but on the other hand resource usage has improved. I have tried to keep things as compatible as possible, but it is likely that if you use some types of advanced CSS in your comments it may not render as before. In PDF output, the way the output is generated has been completely changed, however most things should just continue to work as before, with the exception of header and footer templates, which will need their HTML code to be adjusted slightly, details here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...rs-and-footers Finally, you might notice that the size of the calibre downloads has approximately doubled, blame Qt WebEngine. I would appreciate it if some of you would try the beta for a while and report any issues. It is perfectly safe to upgrade to the beta and then downgrade back to mainline releases, if you find problems. In particular, feedback on the new viewer would be useful since now is the time to make changes to it, before a public release. Report issues in this thread, please. Betas are available at: https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/ Thanks