Books not displaying as they should

[unko]

Okay, I'm having a hard time understanding why Calibre doesn't display my books as-is--rather, what I see in the thumbnail isn't what I would get, and I would greatly prefer to view my books the way that the publisher intended, rather than what I'm seeing, which I think is Liberation Serif. Someone in another forum speculated that Calibre may have converted all my books in advance. This isn't true, because, when I access my books in the Calibre library from another book reader, such as muPDF, the books display just fine; however, whenever I open a book from my Calibre library, it takes a good minute until Calibre actually displays it, so I suspect that calibre is in fact sort of converting the books when they are displayed. Looking in my Calibre library, Calibre only maintains one copy of the book, and that's the vanilla version, though.

Here's an image to make things clearer:

Moderator Notice
deleted

Edit:
Okay, I just noticed that there was a settings prompt in the toolbar while displaying the book, and in that window, there's a bunch of prompts under "Font options". When I change this options, they modify the text being displayed, which makes things a little bit more manageable, but what I would really like is to get rid of these modifications altogether and just read the darn book as it was supposed to be read! Why is there no way to toggle this?

Moderator Notice
Oversize deleted. Please follow our guidelines. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/fa...ing_guidelines

[kovidgoyal]

Why on earth have you told calibre to use its internal reader for PDF? Go to Preferences->Behavior and uncheck PDF under use internal viewer for:

And make sure that your OS default PDF handling application is not the calibre viewer either.

[Fiat_Lux]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Why on earth have you told calibre to use its internal reader for PDF?

What is the issue with using Calibre to use its internal reader for PDF?

[kovidgoyal]

Because PDF is not an ebook format and the viewer is designed for ebook formats.

[unko]

Okay, thanks, guys. I think I understand. So the issue I'm having is just a fundamental quirk of the Calibre document viewer, right? Then I should use another document viewer and leave the file management to Calibre. But how do I do that? How do I "pipe in" a document via Calibre to another document viewer? Is there a way to configure this? Are there certain document viewers that Calibre will automagically pipe to? By the way, I didn't toggle the PDF option under Preferences>Behavior for internal viewing, so I'm really at a loss.

Edit:
Also, sorry to theducks for not adhering to the guidelines. I'm sorry. I'll try better next time!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by unko

Okay, thanks, guys. I think I understand. So the issue I'm having is just a fundamental quirk of the Calibre document viewer, right? Then I should use another document viewer and leave the file management to Calibre. But how do I do that? How do I "pipe in" a document via Calibre to another document viewer? Is there a way to configure this? Are there certain document viewers that Calibre will automagically pipe to? By the way, I didn't toggle the PDF option under Preferences>Behavior for internal viewing, so I'm really at a loss.

Edit:
Also, sorry to theducks for not adhering to the guidelines. I'm sorry. I'll try better next time!

Preferences: Behavior: Remove the ticks when you want the (registered app) OS to supply the viewer for those formats.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by unko

By the way, I didn't toggle the PDF option under Preferences>Behavior for internal viewing, so I'm really at a loss.

I'm not sure what calibre does if a format (PDF, TXT etc) doesn't have a default viewer specified at the OS level and the format is unchecked in the Preferences->Behaviour->Use internal viewer for

Try this - right click on PDF in Book Details and select Open PDF with, if there's nothing there, add a suitable program such as muPDF.

BR

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I'm not sure what calibre does if a format (PDF, TXT etc) doesn't have a default viewer specified at the OS level and the format is unchecked in the Preferences->Behaviour->Use internal viewer for

Try this - right click on PDF in Book Details and select Open PDF with, if there's nothing there, add a suitable program such as muPDF.

BR

BR
I believe the OS does just what it would if you had double-clicked a file in Explore: Ask you what App do you want to use.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

BR
I believe the OS does just what it would if you had double-clicked a file in Explore: Ask you what App do you want to use.

I was away from my calibre m/c this morning so I couldn't check, but I just saw that's true on Windows, but do we know the OP is using Windows, what about OSX. The muPDF program mentioned in the first post would seem to run on 'anything'.

@unko - did you check this.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And make sure that your OS default PDF handling application is not the calibre viewer either.

BR

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by unko

Okay, thanks, guys. I think I understand. So the issue I'm having is just a fundamental quirk of the Calibre document viewer, right?

Correct, the calibre viewer is essentially an epub viewer so it converts the pdf to epub prior to viewing. As you found out PDFs do not convert well at all.

[unko]

Okay, thanks, guys. The solution was as simple as opening up console and typing:

$ xdg-mime default mupdf.desktop application/pdf

Easy-peasy. I will confess, I'm kind of embarrassed it didn't occur to me that my OS hadn't assigned mupdf as the default PDF reader by--well, by default. I also feel bad that I didn't read the docs close enough to find out that the Calibre viewer didn't actually support that filetype.

Really, this isn't even a Calibre issue, so I feel sort of bad for posting on here, but, nonetheless, I really appreciate the help!