[GUI Plugin] Annotations

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by droopy

thanks, David!
I noticed i didn't have the button on my toolbar, so i added it to my toolbar (the toolbar that appears when device is connected). I now see a yellow highlighter. I tap that Highlighter button, and then choose "Fetch Annotations from Device" and after several seconds thinking, I see a Confirmation window. I choose to import annations from all seven books.

I like how there's formatting in the Annotations window, and I like how when I mouse-hover over it, i see a whole lot more. Besides a mouse-hover, how else can I see as much of my annotations for a book in one glance?

I'm not sure what you are asking here. But, in the Annotations import window, you can preview the fetched annotations. Either select the book and press the preview button, or double-click on the book.

Once you have imported the annotations, they will be in whatever column you have configured for them. That should be displayed in the details pain in calibre when you select the book. If you want to find the books with annotations, use the "Find annotations" function in the plugin.

Or were you after something else?

[droopy]

hi davidfor,
i had wanted to see what I see when I mouse-hover a book's annotations field (i.e., I see much/all of a book's annotations, without having to depend on a mouse-hover.

If I single click in a book's annotations field, I do get an Edit Annotations box that pops up, but I don't really need to edit anything. I mean, if this is the best I can get to get a huge view of a book's annotations, I'll be okay.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by droopy

hi davidfor,
i had wanted to see what I see when I mouse-hover a book's annotations field (i.e., I see much/all of a book's annotations, without having to depend on a mouse-hover.

If I single click in a book's annotations field, I do get an Edit Annotations box that pops up, but I don't really need to edit anything. I mean, if this is the best I can get to get a huge view of a book's annotations, I'll be okay.

I still don't understand what you are wanting. But, maybe it's my side, so...

The annotations are fetched from the device and stored in a column in calibre. They can be added the comments, or put into a separate column. After that, they all handling is done by calibre. Calibre shows the column in the interface. If a tooltip for a column is displayed, it is done by calibre and formatted by calibre. Apart from the HTML formatting the annotations are created with, the plugin has no control over how calibre displays the annotations at other times.

[bopuc]

Hello!

I just noticed you seem to have changed the HTML markup of the annotations saved in the Calibre database (may have been a while ago, I haven't updated since last October).

I run a script to extract my Annotations from the Calibre database into a separate system and the change has broken this. Specifically you seem to have removed some of the semantics that used to be there, e.g.:"class="user_annotations"", class="timestamp", class="highlight", etc…

Could I ask kindly that you please put that stuff back in? Not only is purely presentational HTML very 1990s, but for those of us who do further processing, having semantic markup makes it possible to parse the HTML out into data again for our own uses.

Pretty please?

I can see, looking at my DB, that you seem to have changed the HTML at least 2-3 times. I'd be happy to help clear this up and fix it if you need a hand!

Pleeeease? I built a huge system based off of Calibre and this plugin *expressly* so I can do stuff with my Annotation. This change breaks almost a decade of work… :\

(Also noticed that what is stored in the DB is not what is rendered in the Calibre "Edit Metadata" view for books. The database still holds the old HTML, whereas the View Metadata parses it into the new HTML markup? )

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by bopuc

Hello!

I just noticed you seem to have changed the HTML markup of the annotations saved in the Calibre database (may have been a while ago, I haven't updated since last October).

I run a script to extract my Annotations from the Calibre database into a separate system and the change has broken this. Specifically you seem to have removed some of the semantics that used to be there, e.g.:"class="user_annotations"", class="timestamp", class="highlight", etc…

Could I ask kindly that you please put that stuff back in? Not only is purely presentational HTML very 1990s, but for those of us who do further processing, having semantic markup makes it possible to parse the HTML out into data again for our own uses.

Pretty please?

I can see, looking at my DB, that you seem to have changed the HTML at least 2-3 times. I'd be happy to help clear this up and fix it if you need a hand!

Pleeeease? I built a huge system based off of Calibre and this plugin *expressly* so I can do stuff with my Annotation. This change breaks almost a decade of work… :\

(Also noticed that what is stored in the DB is not what is rendered in the Calibre "Edit Metadata" view for books. The database still holds the old HTML, whereas the View Metadata parses it into the new HTML markup? )

The markup used by the plugin has not changed in any of the ways mentioned. It still generates markup that uses those classes. I have rewritten a lot of code that generates the markup, but, it should have only fixed some errors where the markup was not generated correctly.

What has changed is the editing widget used by calibre for text columns. When you edit and save these columns, the markup is rewritten without these classes and with other changes to the markup. This is a change that came in with calibre 4.0 as the widget used before is no longer supported in the version of Qt that calibre now uses. There have been some changes since, so the markup after editing is a little different than in 4.0. There is absolutely nothing I can do about this.

[bopuc]

Ahhh that explains the strange behavior I am seeing. (Basically the old markup is still intact in the database, but when I look through the widget it is parsed out into pure presentational HTML… and if I Save it overwrites the old!

This is truly a terrible shame!

There is one thing we could do, but I know better than to make feature requests to people who already contribute their time to such projects (i.e.: you heh ): have an optional feature to save a JSON representation of the annotation data into a "custom column".

Or make your transient annotation.db less transient/more reliable.

Or bypass the widget and create an Annotations-specific UI / window.

All beyond the scope I imagine you've set for this project.


Thank you in any case. I have gotten great (personal) value out of this plugin for several years. Sadly… that may be over.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre 5 will have first class support for annotations in it viewer and database. So this plugin can be modified to use that functionality when it becomes available.

[bopuc]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre 5 will have first class support for annotations in it viewer and database. So this plugin can be modified to use that functionality when it becomes available.

Eeexcellent! 🙏 Thank you gents.
Until then, I will add a step to my process to save out all my existing and from-now-on-until-then annotations into a DB of my own in anticipation for this.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre 5 will have first class support for annotations in it viewer and database. So this plugin can be modified to use that functionality when it becomes available.

You've been promising that for years. And I keep hoping you won't do it so that I don't have to rewrite this plugin

I have seen the checkins for this, but, haven't really tried to use it. I think I saw that an environment variable or something was needed to enable it. But, I can wait.

[kovidgoyal]

The UI for creating annotations in the viewer is done. Serializing and displaying annotations is next. After that storing them in the db and having some dedicated UI for browsing/searching them across books.

You can tryout the UI (its a bit rough at the moment) with

calibre-debug -c "from calibre.utils.rapydscript import *; compile_viewer();" && CALIBRE_ENABLE_DEVELOP_MODE=1 calibre-debug -w file.epub

Then press the "a" key to start creating an annotation. Note that currently you can only highlight, adding text to highlights is not yet implemented.

[davidfor]

Yep, that works. I agree with the bit rough. The handles especially so But, I can see where you are going with it. And the highlighting does work. I'm looking forward to the rest.

[bopuc]

Now if only there were a standard coordinate system/way of mapping ebook contents so that annotations (highlights, notes, bookmarks, etc) could stay "in context" in the text, or at least be reliably anchored to it.

Dreams…

[droopy]

Originally Posted by bopuc

I run a script to extract my Annotations from the Calibre database into a separate system

Hi bopuc

I'm curious. What separate system did you create?

[zenwolfe]

Hi davidfor, love the annotations plugin. It's worked great for me but trying to use it today, it's unable to pick up any new annotations/highlights I've made. I checked the myclippings text file, and they're there, but for some reason the annotations plugin isn't picking them up. Any idea how to fix this?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by zenwolfe

Hi davidfor, love the annotations plugin. It's worked great for me but trying to use it today, it's unable to pick up any new annotations/highlights I've made. I checked the myclippings text file, and they're there, but for some reason the annotations plugin isn't picking them up. Any idea how to fix this?

Do the books the annotations are on match to books in the library? And does the title and author in the "My Clippings.txt" file match the title and author elsewhere? These all have to match for the annotation to be fetched.

Other than that, I'd need to see a debug log. Run calibre in debug mode, fetch the annotations and close calibre. Then post or PM the debug log with the "My Clippings.txt" file with some details of what is being missed. I will have a look and hopefully see if I can see what is happening.