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msr · Yesterday, 02:08 PM

I have an update of sorts. There was a quirk I had run into with Windows/Calibre in the past that I had forgotten about which is probably related to why it wasn't working for me.

If I run the Calibre portable executable directly everything works fine as expected. If I create a shortcut somewhere (e.g., my desktop) and run Calibre that way, everything works fine as expected. HOWEVER, if I run the Calibre portable executable and pin it to the taskbar, without doing anything else special, when I subsequently try to run Calibre using the taskbar shortcut, it does NOT recognize my portable library (nor any of my settings) and creates a default library in my user folder with default settings. I can, of course, tell it to open my actual library in the portable location, but I shouldn't have to do that.

The (Windows) problem is that the shortcut created when one pins Calibre to the taskbar is not targeting the portable executable, it's targeting the Calibre.exe inside the Calibre subfolder of the portable installation. I don't remember what my previous solution for this was (perhaps an environmental variable?), but it seems likely that it broke something that was leading to the page counting error, as well as the really slow book viewer issue I'd been annoyed with for the last year or so.

This time I edited the path within the taskbar shortcut to point to the correct executable (as well as the "Start in:" directory) and that seems to have fixed the taskbar shortcut without breaking Calibre functionality. Certainly an easier solution.

Weirdly, you do have to edit a shortcut you pin, you cannot simply drop a new shortcut into the Taskbar quick start directory... (this was a change at some point (Win11?), probably security related, because there was a time a number of years ago where you could absolutely do this). MS somehow recognizes this as created in a different manner and blocks it from appearing in the taskbar...all of which is still buried under an Internet Explorer user directory path, because why not continue to rely on horribly out of date concepts and directories you cooked into your OS decades ago.

Yesterday, 02:08 PM	#11
msr Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 59820 Join Date: Jul 2009 Device: Kobo	I have an update of sorts. There was a quirk I had run into with Windows/Calibre in the past that I had forgotten about which is probably related to why it wasn't working for me. If I run the Calibre portable executable directly everything works fine as expected. If I create a shortcut somewhere (e.g., my desktop) and run Calibre that way, everything works fine as expected. HOWEVER, if I run the Calibre portable executable and pin it to the taskbar, without doing anything else special, when I subsequently try to run Calibre using the taskbar shortcut, it does NOT recognize my portable library (nor any of my settings) and creates a default library in my user folder with default settings. I can, of course, tell it to open my actual library in the portable location, but I shouldn't have to do that. The (Windows) problem is that the shortcut created when one pins Calibre to the taskbar is not targeting the portable executable, it's targeting the Calibre.exe inside the Calibre subfolder of the portable installation. I don't remember what my previous solution for this was (perhaps an environmental variable?), but it seems likely that it broke something that was leading to the page counting error, as well as the really slow book viewer issue I'd been annoyed with for the last year or so. This time I edited the path within the taskbar shortcut to point to the correct executable (as well as the "Start in:" directory) and that seems to have fixed the taskbar shortcut without breaking Calibre functionality. Certainly an easier solution. Weirdly, you do have to edit a shortcut you pin, you cannot simply drop a new shortcut into the Taskbar quick start directory... (this was a change at some point (Win11?), probably security related, because there was a time a number of years ago where you could absolutely do this). MS somehow recognizes this as created in a different manner and blocks it from appearing in the taskbar...all of which is still buried under an Internet Explorer user directory path, because why not continue to rely on horribly out of date concepts and directories you cooked into your OS decades ago.