Thread: Do you use the WordDumb calibre plugin to generate X-Ray files?
View Single Post
Old 01-13-2026, 07:23 PM   #5
j.p.s
Grand Sorcerer
j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.j.p.s ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 5,960
Karma: 106589921
Join Date: Apr 2011
Device: pb360
Quote:
Originally Posted by xor_ View Post
I've tried it but have found the auto-generated x-ray files underwhelming. The only good one I've encountered was actually hand-crafted for The 3-Body Problem. Wasn't it even done by you, j.p.s?
Yes, that was me. I'm sorry that was the only good one that you've encountered.

The quality of most of the (publisher generated?) amazon supplied XRAY*.asc that I've used have been poor and I've started a number of threads on mobilread complaining bitterly about it. I eventually found that I could correct a lot of the problems with SQL and hoped that amazon would get shamed into upping their game, but that got tedious and old very fast and no one else ever joined in.

The early third party X-ray generators were windows and/or mac only or weren't available to me for some other reason. In spite of its even worse at the time short comings WordDumb generated X-ray files far better than those from amazon. Suggestion to allow supplying custom aliases while still getting the description from wikipedia or wherever, set a custom description, or specify omission of bogus entities were all implemented very quickly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xor_ View Post
And given that one of the dependencies takes forever to compile on my Gentoo system, I've recently ditched the plugin. Might pick it up again eventually on a different system.
Yeah, I've never been able to keep up with the requirements and required calibre version for a few years now and I have to use earlier versions. Lucky for me I was able to meet the requirements for a version that had the bug fixes and features that I wanted most. I think I did edit a python file in the zip of of the installed plugin to get a fix and it worked, but that was a bit of luck.

I think it has also hit diminishing returns for the increaded CPU/GPU it thows into the generation, so I'm not inclined to even want to run the latest versions.

What inspired me to try to stir up more interest is that it's possible to make one custom json file for an entire series and it just ignores any entities that it doesn't find in the book. It was also easy to write a short SQL script that lists all the entities that onlly occur N times or less in the book and a perl script to build an omit that list from the X-ray file. That last is supposed to be a customization option, but I could never get it to work and the dependencies were already beyond what I can meet so I never reported it and have just been putting up with bogus entites which I don't usually encounter while reading.
j.p.s is offline   Reply With Quote