Redundant L&F setting.

[BetterRed]

You won't believe this:

I booted into Safe mode Minimal, none of my tray gadgets started ✓ Started 8.2.1 portable with the Demo Library. The ≡ ley on Author, Tags, and Publisher in all 3 books popped the short (bad) menu… but the long (good) menu on Ids: Google.

Booted into Normal mode - the ≡ key on Tags (History) in the two Morley books was showing the short (bad) menu, but on Tags (Classic) in the Tolstoy it was showing the long (good) menu.

So I added a Tag (Westminster Parliament) to the Edmund Burke book, guess what - press the ≡ key on it shows the long (good) menu, but "History" continues to show the short (bad) menu. Here are the screen shots:





And if I change a "History" Tag to "Political History" the ≡ key on it pops the long (good) menu.

BR 😕🤒

[chaley]

You have inexplicable behavior. I can't make it fail.

Perhaps it is caused by you being in the southern hemisphere.

[BetterRed]

Or being 10 hours ahead of the curve

[BetterRed]

. . .

BTW: I installed portable 8.2.100 on a thumb drive. I've been able to plug it into it into 3 systems - not mine, none of which have ever seen calibre, one of which was a spanking brand new just delivered Surface Pro. All three show the wrong menu when I tab to John Schember in the Book details and press the ≡ key.

I did not change any settings, or add any books - and it was a new freshly formatted thumb drive. The new Surface Pro had no add ons or any 3rd party software installed, so it was vanilla too. And Safe mode gave the same result.

Given one my Kiwi collaborators can reproduce, maybe it is a latitudinal (or time zone) phenomena

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

BTW: I installed portable 8.2.100 on a thumb drive. I've been able to plug it into it into 3 systems - not mine, none of which have ever seen calibre, one of which was a spanking brand new just delivered Surface Pro. All three show the wrong menu when I tab to John Schember in the Book details and press the ≡ key.

I did not change any settings, or add any books - and it was a new freshly formatted thumb drive. The new Surface Pro had no add ons or any 3rd party software installed, so it was vanilla too. And Safe mode gave the same result.

Given one my Kiwi collaborators can reproduce, maybe it is a latitudinal (or time zone) phenomena

BR

What exactly do you do?

What I tried:

• Installed CP 8.2.100. I don't have a clean machine available.
• Ran it, accepting the defaults for the start up wizard
• Pressed I to open a detached book details window.
• Pressed tab twice to get a dashed box around John Schember.
• Pressed ≡.

The correct menu opened.

Is there *anything* you are doing differently besides the clean machine?

[BetterRed]

↑ ↑ ↑ ✔ — That's it exactly

In real life it's totally inconsistent, but then again it's not:

In my Books library:

• if I tag any book with "History" I get the short menu when I tab to it and press ≡, if I change a tag on an individual book to "Nistory", I get the long menu.
• If I change the "History" tag to "Nistory" in Manage Tags I get the long menu on all books.
• If I tag any book with "England" I always get the long menu when I tab to it and press ≡, including books that have the misbehaving "History" tag.
• And of course, if I backtab into any field and press ≡ I get the long menu.

It get's weirder, I don't ordinarily make use the Tags column in my Creators library - but if I Tag any Creator with any of the three values mentioned (i.e. History, Nistory, England) I get the same behaviour as I do in my Books library

In other words it appears to be dependent on actual value - irrespective of library, or column

I changed John Schember to John Shampoo, et voila — up pops the long menu.



Changed it back to John Schember, sacre bleu — we're back to the short menu.



This is up there with the most bizarre 'bugs' I've come across in almost 60 years of messing about with software.

After thought: I should do the download/install to a new thumb drive on someone else's machine - I did that step on my machine.

BR

[chaley]

I might have an explanation. Inside Qt, tabbing to an "anchor" (something that might have a context menu) gives me a X position that appears to be the top right corner of the box. The Y position is inside the box. Backtabbing in gives me an X position that appears to be the top left corner of the box with the Y position inside the box.

Theory: there are some situations where using tab-in, the position "misses" the corner because of rendered string length. I can imagine this happening if the screen scale is set to more than one hundred or if using a font where the size might need rounding when being rendered.

Questions:

• What is your screen scale?
• What font are you using?
• Does it happen if you use a fixed width font?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

I might have an explanation. Inside Qt, tabbing to an "anchor" (something that might have a context menu) gives me a X position that appears to be the top right corner of the box. The Y position is inside the box. Backtabbing in gives me an X position that appears to be the top left corner of the box with the Y position inside the box.

Theory: there are some situations where using tab-in, the position "misses" the corner because of rendered string length. I can imagine this happening if the screen scale is set to more than one hundred or if using a font where the size might need rounding when being rendered.

Questions:

• What is your screen scale?
• What font are you using?
• Does it happen if you use a fixed width font?

Looks like you've found the 'bug'

What is your screen scale?


[*]What font are you using?



Does it happen if you use a fixed width font?

Yes, but some things that are 'good' with Segoe UI are 'bad' with Courier New, and vice versa - zip of screen shots attached.

I'm surprised I saw the same on the new Surface Pro. The other two systems have hi res ultra wide monitors, like mine, one was a former colleague's 40" Eizo. Maybe I saw what I wanted to see on the Surface, I only had it for a few minutes.

Added: AFAIC this issue is 'resolved', the inexplicability bothered me much more than the errant behaviour.

BR

[chaley]

Looking at the screencaptures showing United Kingdom vs United Kingdoom, it appears that the surrounding box is closer to the 'm' of 'Kingdom' than the 'm' of 'Kingdoom'. Hard to see for sure.

If you can run from source then try the attached python file to test if my theory is correct. Although I can't see why it would break anything, I hesitate to submit it to Kovid with no evidence that it fixes anything.

Extract "book_details.py" from the zip file then put it in the calibre source tree: "src\calibre\gui2\book_details.py"

[BetterRed]

I don't have the source. When I tried to clone it a few years ago I ran into a permission issue. Because my motivation was idle curiosity, I didn't bother trying to resolve whatever it was, And I've not been inclined or had any pressing need to retry since.

I'll have another go - but it'll probably be a few weeks.

---

Another defect in BD:



Selecting Remove on Id leads to this error

calibre, version 8.2.100
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>KeyError</b>:'id'

Spoiler:

calibre 8.2.100 Portable embedded-python: True
Windows-10-10.0.19045-SP0 Windows ('64bit', 'WindowsPE')
('Windows', '10', '10.0.19045')
Python 3.11.5
Windows: ('10', '10.0.19045', 'SP0', 'Multiprocessor Free')
Interface language: None
EXE path: D:\Calibre\Portables\zTest\Calibre\calibre.exe
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre\gui2\actions\edit_metadata.py", line 893, in remove_metadata_item
File "calibre\db\cache.py", line 85, in call_func_with_lock
File "calibre\db\cache.py", line 1620, in set_field
KeyError: 'id'

Date, uuid, Size etc are similar.

BR

[chaley]

Open a bug report so the problem doesn't get lost.

[BetterRed]

I logged the two separate issues - that they'e both in BD is coincidental.

Bug #2107685 “Menu ≡ key in detached Book details gives erratic ...” : Bugs : calibre

Bug #2107683 “Remove Id, Modified, Size etc in Book Details give...” : Bugs : calibre

BR

[BetterRed]

↑ ↑ ↑ ✔

Version 8.3.100 - fixes both.

Thanks