[DNSB]

Originally Posted by lostinlodos

We’ll start in the more basic end. Microsoft’s Encyclopædia of Networking comes in at 822MB in ePub.
The Illustrated Guide To Commodore Components is 1.3GB
Multiple game platform A-Z books are over 1GB.
D&D books regularly exceed 500MB. Some well into the Low Gigabyte range.
All of those are ePub, not PDF.
Comic books, art books, etc

The recommendation from Adobe was a few years back. The comment was that most of the early versions of Adobe Acrobat/Acrobat Reader were not happy with PDF files exceeding 500MB. In theory, you could go to 10GB using the 10 bit counters. With later version of the PDF standard and using a 64 bit architecture, you could exceed the 10GB limit but that would result in PDF files that could not be opened by most of the PDF reader software.

As for massive ePub files? Quite a few of even the newest renderers have issues with larger files internal to the epub.

I will admit to some admiration for your desire to keep obsolete information around. The last time I looked at the Microsoft Encyclopedia of Networking was the 2nd edition back in 2002—I might even have the CDROM still around. I have seen an ebook version dated from around 2014 but that was in DJVU format and clocked in at a massive 12MB. From the size you report, I would suspect that your copy is likely a collection of scanned images. Is yours the first edition with Mitch Tulloch as the sole author or the second edition with Mitch and Ingrid Tulloch listed as co-authors. BTW, it sounds very much as if you have a pirated copy of the book since it is still under copyright unless you scanned in your own copy.

Originally Posted by lostinlodos

Sure. But it’s marketed across the web as a powerful ebook converter.
Many people are going to find it when they type in ebook converter to any of the dozen or so independent search engines.
It may be more, but its general presence on the internet is first and formost as a converter.

Marketed by whom? Not Kovid Goyal and he is the originator of calibre and still the main programmer.

Originally Posted by lostinlodos

I bring up ECC for a good reason. The continued statement use the command line.
Well, that would be great for making an ePub. Which then needs extracting to manually modify the HTML to match my visual preferences. Then recompressed, a difficult task for compliance. ECC makes that recompress one step.
It’s a method I use on a rare occasion for over complicated non-drm books that calibre has trouble with.
When all else fails extract, load the HTML files into NeO, make the changes, save, and ECC produces a nice neat file to send to my phone or Boox tablet.

Sorry but you and I are going to have to disagree on just what conversion is. Unpacking an ePub file or repacking files into an ePub file is not conversion. I have a batch file that uses 7Zip to either unpack an ePub or repack it with the mimetype file left uncompressed and as the first entry in the .zip structure—I've seen ePubs where both of those requirements were flubbed. I would not call it a converter or editor.

I am wondering about your use for NeO as a html editor. I vaguely remember a co-worker using it as an outliner which she used to organize her information.

As for editing the xhtml files in an ePub, I used Sigil for a lot of versions since a few months after Strahinja Markovic released it in 2009. I've also used the calibre ebook-editor since it's early days. No need to uncompress and recompress the files, it's done in the background. I've fed ePubs into Sigil that had FlightCheck and/or ePubcheck generating multiple pages of error messages and still managed to edit them and correct the errors.

Originally Posted by lostinlodos

Finally, times change I guess. Whatever you’re using Calibre for is your choice. For all of us, we use what’s right for us. Calibre has plugins, and is easy to create plugins for, that cover a very wide range of formats.

You choose to use it as a document manager and library.

None of this changes my original point: there’s no technical reason we can’t option it for disable storing deleted files.
For the however many that found calibre through a web search looking for the best converter available… it would be greatly appreciated.
Again, I’m not the only one who said anything.

Repeating your desire to have calibre's builtin deleted file manager disabled is not likely to do much. If being able to disable it was a desired feature, we would likely be seeing more requests from people who wanted it implemented. Perhaps most people have hard drives that are large enough that having a few gigabytes of deleted files is not a big deal?