[chaley]

Brave souls are invited to beta test a release of Calibre containing several major new features. This release is being made available for testing and for comments. Feedback via either the forum or tickets is encouraged, but please be nice. Telling me that the changes are junk and that you hate my cat will depress both of us. When my cat is depressed she chews her fur off, and you don’t want that on your conscience, do you?

All the features will be moved into the standard Calibre release some time in the future, that time to be determined by the feedback.

We have made extensive changes to Calibre. Kovid has graciously provided *many* hours of help and underlying implementation work, but even with his fixing things behind me it is probable that something I broke has slipped out. Please don’t be a tester if having Calibre fall over dead is something you really don’t want to encounter.

VERY IMPORTANT:

1. Please backup your library before trying the beta. Although we don’t expect a meltdown, it is possible.
2. If you use the beta and add custom columns, then you won’t be able to go back to the standard 0.6.x releases with the same library. Extensive database changes were required for the user-defined columns. Although some of the compatibility issues will be addressed 0.6.52, it's still not a good idea to depend on backwards compatibility. To keep the same library, you must continue with beta releases until the code is integrated into the standard release.

Still with me? Like I said, brave soul…

The major changes are:

1. User-defined columns. You can now create new columns in the library display. Columns are created by going to Preferences, Interface and clicking on the ‘+’ icon shown next to the list of columns to display. When creating a column, the ‘lookup’ name is what is used to search for items in the column, the column heading is what appears at the top of the column, and the column type determines what will be put in the column. The column types available are:
   • short text. These columns appear in the tags browser
   • tag-style text (comma-separated words). These columns appear in the tags browser.
   • ratings (stars). These columns appear in the tags browser comments-style text.
   • dates
   • floating point numbers
   • integers
   • Yes/no (boolean). See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80473 for discussion of 2- vs 3-state yes/no columns.
   You can hide and reorder the user-defined columns in the same way that you can hide predefined columns, by using the Interface tab in preferences.
   
   User-defined columns are integrated into the tags browser. Searching and sorting on these columns is implemented.
   
   The ability to make these columns into collections has not yet been implemented.
   
2. Virtual libraries. A saved search can be used to create virtual libraries. When you choose a search in the ‘Restrict to:’ box, the library will show only books matching this search, the tags browser will show only items that appear in the matched books, and the books count will change to reflect the restriction. The search box is left empty, and can be used as normal to further refine what is being seen. See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...6&postcount=20 for more discussion.
   
   One note: when you add a book, it will appear in the virtual library even though it does not match the restriction. However, if you do a search or otherwise cause the restriction to be recalculated, new books will disappear unless they actually match the restriction. If the new books are intended to be matched, you should correct their metadata immediately after adding them to avoid having them drop off the list because of some other action. And no, we aren’t planning to automatically change the metadata of new books to match a restriction, because the reverse analysis of the restriction search is very hard to do correctly.
   
3. User-defined tag categories. You can now create a top-level category in the tag browser pane, and then put items into that category. For example, you could create categories for Favorite Authors, Favorite Genres, Spouse’s Stuff, or what-have-you. A user-defined category can contain items from any built-in or user-defined column except Ratings and News. There is a button below the tag browser that opens an editor to create or change these categories.

The release also contains several less intrusive features and bug fixes. Some are:

1. Panes such as the tags browser and metadata display now can be resized. There is a special toolbar for hiding and restoring the panes. Double-clicking on the separator will also hide/restore a pane.
   
2. Date searches can use special names to specify a day. The names are ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘thismonth’, and ‘Ndaysago’ where N is some number.
   
3. Calibre now saves the last three sorts and replays them when it restarts. A ‘tweak’ is available to override this behavior and force a specific search on startup.
   
4. You are now asked for confirmation when deleting a saved search.
   
5. Ratings have been added to the tags browser
   
6. Checks for an update have been moved to a separate thread, making them less intrusive if the network is slow.
   
7. The regular expression tester now works across lines.
   
8. Lots of bug fixes taken from the standard release.

There is a long list of other changes and bug fixes, most of which will shortly appear in the standard release.

Source is available at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kovid/calibre/custom-cols/. This branch will be kept up-to-date until the features are integrated with the standard release.

Binaries are available at http://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/betas/. It isn’t clear how often new beta binary releases will be made, or indeed if more releases will be made. The answer depends on how well the beta goes.

Have fun.