Calibre newbie -- bugs, comments, and feature requests :)

[partnerinflight]

First, great job on Calibre. As a new owner of a Nook I found myself much relieved that there's such a convenient app around to manage my newly budding library.

One small irritant that I've noticed so far: I grabbed a few books off various places (pdfs, mostly), and then used Calibre's ISBN/metadata lookup functionality to fill out the book details. However when I import these books into my Nook the author names (and some of the title names) have the last character replaced with a garbage unicode character (usually a Chinese character)... I'm assuming this is a bug in Calibre's unicode processing? Has anyone else seen this? Is there a way I can fix it on my own?

One other small irritant: one of the books I loaded was in .doc format. I used Save-To-PDF from MSWord, then imported the PDF in Calibre. When read from the Nook however, the pagination is fairly messed up. Basically it seems that Word's soft page breaks have been replaced with hard breaks, so some pages show up on Nook half or quarter-filled. Is that an issue with Word's PDF conversion, or a Calibre import issue? Should I have not used PDF at all? (Maybe RTF instead?)

Finally one feature request. (or maybe this already exists...) Is there a way to merge several books into one? (Specifically I've downloaded a bunch of short stories... it'd be nice to make an anthology book...) Any idea how that might be done?

Thanks again!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by partnerinflight

One other small irritant: one of the books I loaded was in .doc format. I used Save-To-PDF from MSWord, then imported the PDF in Calibre. When read from the Nook however, the pagination is fairly messed up. Basically it seems that Word's soft page breaks have been replaced with hard breaks, so some pages show up on Nook half or quarter-filled. Is that an issue with Word's PDF conversion, or a Calibre import issue? Should I have not used PDF at all? (Maybe RTF instead?)

RTF or TXT will work much better. IMHO, the best is "filtered html." PDF is probably the worst choice. My wife creates books in .doc, saves as filtered html, adds to Calibre and converts to EPUB.

Finally one feature request. (or maybe this already exists...) Is there a way to merge several books into one? (Specifically I've downloaded a bunch of short stories... it'd be nice to make an anthology book...) Any idea how that might be done?

What format? The user manual has a description of how to do this with html. If it's .doc, you can do it in Word, create a TOC in Word and follow the filtered html procedure above.

[speakingtohe]

Finally one feature request. (or maybe this already exists...) Is there a way to merge several books into one? (Specifically I've downloaded a bunch of short stories... it'd be nice to make an anthology book...) Any idea how that might be done?

You can do it physically with a word processor by converting the books to rtf and pasting them to one document.
Format the title of each story as you paste to a TOC style and generate table of contents.

Or you can give them a series name/number and or a tag and send to device as a collection

[partnerinflight]

Thanks guys. I'll try the HTML->Epub conversion instead.

As far as the feature requests -- would be sweet to be able to multi-select several books (in my case short stories) in Calibre, select "Merge", and get a new book out of it. I can do it the hard way, sure, but as long as we're talking convenience...

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by partnerinflight

As far as the feature requests -- would be sweet to be able to multi-select several books (in my case short stories) in Calibre, select "Merge", and get a new book out of it. I can do it the hard way, sure, but as long as we're talking convenience...

I submitted some code to Kovid that "merges" books, but not this way. My code takes multiple records and puts all the metadata and all the formats into a single record. My code doesn't change the content of any book, only the database record that a book format is stored under.

He's talking about taking the of content of multiple different books and putting it into a single book.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by partnerinflight

However when I import these books into my Nook the author names (and some of the title names) have the last character replaced with a garbage unicode character (usually a Chinese character)... I'm assuming this is a bug in Calibre's unicode processing? Has anyone else seen this? Is there a way I can fix it on my own?

This is a known bug with some PDF files in Calibre.

[partnerinflight]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

This is a known bug with some PDF files in Calibre.

Hmm, in my case the files (afaik) are NOT password protected... should I update the bug?

Edit: Nevermind. Just noticed the comments below.