Do you use the WordDumb calibre plugin to generate X-Ray files?

[j.p.s]

Do you use the WordDumb calibre plugin to generate X-Ray files or Word Wise files or EPUB footnotes? If so, please respond to this poll. Multiple selections are allowed, but for the purposes of this poll I consider all the No selections to be mutually exclusive and that any Yes selection means that none of the No selections apply. Please respect that interpretation. "Do you use WordDumb" means that you have used WordDumb to generate files and popped up the notes several times while reading the book and might do so again some time unless you are inclined not to do so again.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=334681

[jackm8]

I think that it's a great tool, smart and well executed, I just don't think that it's bringing anything to the table that I personally need. If I encounter a word that I don't understand, I use a dictionary, and If I need to wiki something, I use a browser. Either in Koreader or on a phone. I'm not a fan of x-ray features. That goes for both WordDumb or official Kindle x-ray. They've managed to spoil stories in a few cases that I've used them.

[xor_]

I've tried it but have found the auto-generated x-ray files underwhelming. The only good one I've encountered was actually hand-crafted for The 3-Body Problem. Wasn't it even done by you, j.p.s?

And given that one of the dependencies takes forever to compile on my Gentoo system, I've recently ditched the plugin. Might pick it up again eventually on a different system.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jackm8

I think that it's a great tool, smart and well executed, I just don't think that it's bringing anything to the table that I personally need. If I encounter a word that I don't understand, I use a dictionary, and If I need to wiki something, I use a browser. Either in Koreader or on a phone.

Thank you for your response. You probably have a lot of company. I'm hoping that there are enough people that like using X-ray or would like using better created X-ray to form a community.

Originally Posted by jackm8

I'm not a fan of x-ray features. That goes for both WordDumb or official Kindle x-ray. They've managed to spoil stories in a few cases that I've used them.

I agree that's a problem. I probably encounter it less because I've been reading mostly non-fiction. It is unfortunate that wikipedia and other wiki or wiki like sites are so prone to put spoilers in their initial summaries.

I hoping that there will eventually be a repository of community generated and polished worddumb-custom-xray.json files available that will result in excellent XRAY.*.asc files. It will certainly challenging to get something like that up and running.

The motivation for this poll is to find out whether a potential community exists. The thread for the plugin has over 700 posts and over 500,000 views, so I was hoping for a larger response to the poll. I did expect that most mobilereaders would not be xray users.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by xor_

I've tried it but have found the auto-generated x-ray files underwhelming. The only good one I've encountered was actually hand-crafted for The 3-Body Problem. Wasn't it even done by you, j.p.s?

Yes, that was me. I'm sorry that was the only good one that you've encountered.

The quality of most of the (publisher generated?) amazon supplied XRAY*.asc that I've used have been poor and I've started a number of threads on mobilread complaining bitterly about it. I eventually found that I could correct a lot of the problems with SQL and hoped that amazon would get shamed into upping their game, but that got tedious and old very fast and no one else ever joined in.

The early third party X-ray generators were windows and/or mac only or weren't available to me for some other reason. In spite of its even worse at the time short comings WordDumb generated X-ray files far better than those from amazon. Suggestion to allow supplying custom aliases while still getting the description from wikipedia or wherever, set a custom description, or specify omission of bogus entities were all implemented very quickly.

Originally Posted by xor_

And given that one of the dependencies takes forever to compile on my Gentoo system, I've recently ditched the plugin. Might pick it up again eventually on a different system.

Yeah, I've never been able to keep up with the requirements and required calibre version for a few years now and I have to use earlier versions. Lucky for me I was able to meet the requirements for a version that had the bug fixes and features that I wanted most. I think I did edit a python file in the zip of of the installed plugin to get a fix and it worked, but that was a bit of luck.

I think it has also hit diminishing returns for the increaded CPU/GPU it thows into the generation, so I'm not inclined to even want to run the latest versions.

What inspired me to try to stir up more interest is that it's possible to make one custom json file for an entire series and it just ignores any entities that it doesn't find in the book. It was also easy to write a short SQL script that lists all the entities that onlly occur N times or less in the book and a perl script to build an omit that list from the X-ray file. That last is supposed to be a customization option, but I could never get it to work and the dependencies were already beyond what I can meet so I never reported it and have just been putting up with bogus entites which I don't usually encounter while reading.