Calibre in a kiosk / art display mode?

[John IV]

Howdy Calibre denizens, I plan to utilize a spare tv/monitor in my new setup as a dedicated 'Calibre kiosk' where I will have Calibre fullscreen in cover grid view. Sort of like those Samsung frame TVs that cycle fine art.

Using a powershell script and cron job I will pass it an 'R' every 10 or 20 mins. to randomly cycle to a new book and a new collection of 36 grid entries etc. in my 3K book collection.

My question for the group is, I will still be using Calibre on the same base machine and wish to retain its layout, but on this kiosk mode I'd like to hide the toolbar and the status bar and do a fullscreen (F11) style if possible. As a bonus perhaps toggling off the book details pane on the right so I just have a pure grid at whatever size I want. Are settings like these exposed in a way I can use, via short-cut key or similar? The book details toggle seems to be for its windowed variant only.

Does Calibre have the concept of 'profiles' in this way, or would I have to craft a second settings *.json and switch to it? I couldn't find anything similar in searches, so please tell me if there's a turn key solution and I'm not re-inventing the wheel. Thank you!

[BetterRed]

Probably not exactly as you'd like it. But have a look at the Layout actions feature. It provides the means to define, save and show different layouts without resorting to swapping different configuration files in and out.

You'll need to add it to a Toolbar or Menu, or access it via the All actions feature - the default shortcut for that is Ctrl+F1.

Oh yes, an upcoming release will have a "Book shelf" feature, that's as much as I know. It maybe even closer to what you want.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Simply use two different calibre config directories, via environment variables, as described in https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/cus...ment-variables setup your kiosk calibre to show only the covergrid by hiding everything else which you can do by clicking the layout button in the bottom right.

But note that only one instance of calibre is allowed to run at a time.

[John IV]

Thank you, guys. Kovid, I am using Calibre Portable on Windows 11 Pro for additional context. With your environmental suggestion do you prefer that vs. for example duplicating the directory structure into a 'kiosk tree', deleting its library, and then creating a symlink to the original directory location? Will that method pose any issues out of curiosity?

[kovidgoyal]

portable already uses the env var trick to use its own config folder, so if you are using portable then my suggestion wont work. But portable is fine for your use case provided you keep your kiosk library separate from the main library and under the portable folder dir. The run portable for kiosk and normal for when you need to access the main library. You can also have th emain library access the kiosk library to transfer books/edit metadata/whatever there.

The downside of this is you have to remember to keep portable and main calibre versions in sync.

[John IV]

Got it, thank you for the direction, and the app as always.