calibre 5: Beta testers needed

[nixsee]

@kovid

1) It is deliberate, there is too much segmentation if you use the full toc tree. One then has to drill down through multiple sections to get to the actual highlight.

Could it be an option to toggle on/off? I don't think I would mind having to drill down, we already do so in the actual TOC and in the Authors, Tags, etc... panes in the main window.

In fact, as can be seen in the screenshot below, the Search in Book function has results segmented down to at least 3 levels, but they aren't nested. It simply displays with all expanded. I'd love to see the same for highlights, except nested (and perhaps nested as well for Search in Book).

A further suggestion: Perhaps even have an expand/collapse all button in each pane?

3) I dont see what's special about the highlights list. All tree views in calibre are like this. Adjusting individual trees by a pixel or two is just a recipe for chaos.

Where else is there a narrowly spaced list like this? As can be seen in the screenshot above, the TOC and Search Results panes have nearly double-spacing. So, I'd actually modify my original request from a couple pixels to 10+, or whatever is used in those panes - they're MUCH easier to read than the Highlights Pane.

I've even just discovered two different features to change spacing in between rows in the book list and tag browser!



So, perhaps the solution is what it has been for most of the annotation features - make it user customizable, like above?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by jony08

@kovid: I think there should be a function to remove all highlights and/or bookmarks from a book/books.

Press Ctrl+A in the highlights panel and click the delete button. For bookmarks you will have to go one by one.

[kovidgoyal]

@JimmXinu: You can get re-entrant violations if something is holding a connection to the sqlite db open and then does something to modify that connection. This should be mostly impossible if you are using the standard calibre db APIs since they wrap database access. However, since plugins can in theory do pretty much anything, there are no guarantees.

It cant be a threading violation since the proceed dialog ensures its callbacks are always called on the main thread. And this is easy to confirm by simply inserting a print to print the thread id in do_ask_question() in proceed.py. This function is called via a Queued signal, which Qt guarantees are only delivered on the main thread (the one with the event loop running). Therefore it must be a re-entrancy violation. It could be that there is some other thread in the program holding the db open other than the main thread. But in vanilla calibre that is only the db backup thread and that works via the calibre db api which uses a RWLock to ensure only a single thread ever does any write operations on a db at a particular time.

I doubt that commit will help the issue, I just made it to make the code cleaner since I was reading it to help with your issue.

[nixsee]

Another (old, but I don't think addressed) suggestion: show an icon beside each highlight to indicate the color/style used. Very useful to see, since different colors usually mean different contexts/categories. Without this, there almost might as well be just 1 highlight color. Perhaps in a separate (borderless) column on the left if it is hard to put it in the same column as the highlight text?

[kovidgoyal]

@nixsee: Its the default spacing for item views. Pretty much any item list that has not been specially customized will have that spacing. For an example look at the search panel you yourself reference. And I'm afraid I am not going to implement fully nested for either search or highlights, even as an option. But I will change the highlights panel to use the lowest level to match the search panel and show the topmost level as a tooltip.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by nixsee

Another (old, but I don't think addressed) suggestion: show an icon beside each highlight to indicate the color/style used. Very useful to see, since different colors usually mean different contexts/categories. Without this, there almost might as well be just 1 highlight color. Perhaps in a separate (borderless) column on the left if it is hard to put it in the same column as the highlight text?

Patches welcome. And note that highlight styles are not just colors they can be underlines/strikeouts whatever.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Patches welcome. And note that highlight styles are not just colors they can be underlines/strikeouts whatever.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...619021a65f5fcd

[Thasaidon]

Hi Kovid

As a loyal longstanding Calibre user I am waiting with bated breath for the Calibre 5 realease.

I do not want to tie you down but could you give us some idea of a provisional' release date? (i.e. soon, weeks, months, before Xmas?)

It is understood that any idea you gave us could be put back if you hit a last minute showstopping problem.

[kovidgoyal]

the next calibre release will be calibre 5. Will almost certainly be sometime this month.

[Thasaidon]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

the next calibre release will be calibre 5. Will almost certainly be sometime this month.

Thank you.

I am excited but will not hold you to that.

[nixsee]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@nixsee: Its the default spacing for item views. Pretty much any item list that has not been specially customized will have that spacing. For an example look at the search panel you yourself reference.

I have looked at the search panel... I included a screenshot that clearly shows that there is nearly twice as much spacing in the Search and TOC panels than the Highlights panel. I have attached the same screenshot again for reference.

To my knowledge, I haven't changed anything for them to appear that way. So, I would love if the default spacing for Highlights matched the default spacing for TOC/Search.

[Ridcully]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

No, I'm afraid not, calibre 5 wont run on win7.

Can I ask which dependency has dropped Win7 or if there's another reason?

I use Calibre every day and I'm really grateful that you've let us Win7 users run Calibre 4 at our own peril even tho it's unsupported. I reckon we'd all really appreciate if you let us do the same on v5.

[kovidgoyal]

@Ridcully: Do a bit of searching and you will find tons of bug reports about calibre 4 not working on windows 7 because of qt webengine. Since calibre 4 was released while windows 7 was still officially supported by Microsoft, I allowed calibre 4 to run on win 7 that is no longer the case with calibre 5 and given that it has a further updated version on webengine,it is likely to fail on even more win 7 computers.

@nixsee: that is because there is space in the search panel entries to display icons, since I added a display of highlight stye as icons in the highlights panel as well, it will now be identical.

[Ridcully]

Oh, ok. Guess I'll be sticking with 4 then until I move to Linux. Thanks again for making this great program!

[kovidgoyal]

Released version 4.99.14 with the following changes

1) A new parser for the calibre template language that adds support for
if/then statements and improves performance. This is the reason for this
beta, so if you use templates heavily, please test.

2) The viewer highlights panel now shows the style of each highlight
next to the entry and the grouping is by the lowest level in the ToC,
not the highest.

3) The search button in the selection bar now triggers a search without
needing to click find next

4) Viewer: Fix an error when triple clicking in Firefox as Firefox does
not support extending selections to full paragraphs, only to lines

5) Viewer: Fix returning to previous position off by a page or two in
some books on first load or after a font size/preferences change.

6) Browser viewer: Fix full screen button missing

7) Viewer: Fix error when creating more than one custom highlight style