Frequently Asked Questions

[TBR]

First of all thanks for your marvelous software and sincere admiration for your continuing determination!

I've already tried with an enhancement request and you closed it referring to the API Documentation and the source code. What I mainly seek is a way to customize news recipes to check the feeds of various news sources for articles that contain one or more of a list of keywords, creating a press overview for a certain topic (e.g. a recipe which creates an e-book of any nyt, wsj, washpost etc. article in the specified period containing the word "Afghanistan" and none of the articles that don't)
I've looked at
http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/news.html
http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...asicnewsrecipe
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kovid/c.../feeds/news.py
but I can't find a way to do it. Am I dense, missing some documentation or have we been mis-communicating?

[kovidgoyal]

If you've seen http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~kovid/c.../feeds/news.py

there's not much more I can tell you. Basically, you can completely customize the news download process by overring the methods of that class. So if you want to create a compsite recipe you would create a parse_index method that will list all the current articles in your various news sources. Then you would override postprocess_html to check for the required keywords and if absent return None

[Francesco]

Hi, thanks for all your work.

I'm just added this feed: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/rss/cartones.xml
Which links to political cartoons. Unfortunately, images are not downloaded, it only shows a little icon in place of the actual jpg. Could you please help me? Is there a line of code I must add?
Thanks!

[lizzybeth05]

So i havent used my ereader in a few months, and as a result, I havent open calibre for awhile either. Today i opened calibre and it told me that there was a new version available and asked if i wanted to update. I clicked yes and it directed me to the website so that i could download the new calibre file.

After downloading i immediately started installing the new version (without uninstalling the my other version - vs 0.6.12) After the new installation had started, i noticed that the website says that if the old version is older than 0.6.17 to uninstall calibre, delete c:\program files\calibre and then install the new version.

When i saw this, i canceled the new installations, and then went to c:\program files\calibre and tried to run uninstall.exe but i got the following error:

Error in action ExecuteAction

Error in action UninstallSelectedFiles

couldn't open "C:/Program Files/calibre/uninstall.exe": permission denied
    while executing
"::open $filename $access $permissions"
    (procedure "miniarc::open" line 64)
    invoked from within
"miniarc::open crap $filename a"
    (procedure "installkit::addfiles" line 2)
    invoked from within
"installkit::addfiles $conf(uninstall) $files $names"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::StoreLogsInUninstall" line 25)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::StoreLogsInUninstall"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::CleanupInstallInfoDirs" line 59)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::CleanupInstallInfoDirs"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::actions::UninstallSelectedFiles" line 336)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::actions::$component $this"
    while executing
"$obj execute"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions" line 62)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions $action -parent $id -conditions $eval"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::actions::ExecuteAction" line 35)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::actions::$component $this"
Error in action ExecuteAction

Error in action UninstallSelectedFiles

couldn't open "C:/Program Files/calibre/uninstall.exe": permission denied
    while executing
"::open $filename $access $permissions"
    (procedure "miniarc::open" line 64)
    invoked from within
"miniarc::open crap $filename a"
    (procedure "installkit::addfiles" line 2)
    invoked from within
"installkit::addfiles $conf(uninstall) $files $names"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::StoreLogsInUninstall" line 25)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::StoreLogsInUninstall"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::CleanupInstallInfoDirs" line 59)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::CleanupInstallInfoDirs"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::actions::UninstallSelectedFiles" line 336)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::actions::$component $this"
    while executing
"$obj execute"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions" line 62)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions $action -parent $id -conditions $eval"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::actions::ExecuteAction" line 35)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::actions::$component $this"
    while executing
"$obj execute"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions" line 62)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::ExecuteActions $id -when $when"
    (procedure "::InstallJammer::RaiseEventHandler" line 79)
    invoked from within
"::InstallJammer::RaiseEventHandler  .wizard"
    (command bound to event)

please help i dont know how to proceed!!

FYI, i still have all my old calibre install files, could i try reinstalling 0.6.12 and then uninstall everything and delete c:\program files\calibre and then install 0.6.40?

thanks in advance

edit: i noticed on the calibre website that a suggestion is to run calibre-debug -g in the comand promt and post the results, so i did this:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Elizabeth>calibre-debug -g
'calibre-debug' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

C:\Documents and Settings\Elizabeth>

[kovidgoyal]

try tight clicking on uninstall.exe and selecting run as administrator

[MichaelJLucasWV]

Just curious, anyway for a layman to have Calibre delete the original ebook on my hard drive when it adds the book to its library? There's no reason to keep both copies on my hard drive, and it would make it a LOT easier for me to remember what i have moved already. (i have MANY ebooks to move and fix the metadata for. Sorry if this is covered already, OR if this is a daft question. I'm still learning.

[kovidgoyal]

No, i'm afraid not

[Tactical Fart]

I've been looking at the documentation a little harder (since my post about increasing the TOC past 50) and found a bunch of metadata arguments that I found useful. However, the program I'm writing has a flaw. It uses calibre's ebook-convert command by sending it to the OS as a command. My program gets data from the internet, parses and organizes it, then calls ebook-convert to make the ebook. But if an author's name has white space, like "John Doe", and I use the "--author" argument, it will only see

-- author "John

No, that's not a typo. It will accept the quotation marks as part of the argument. The only work around I can see is to put the information into the html file(s) and let calibre finish the job. Is there a way to make ebook-convert look in a certain file for metadata, such as author, comments, etc, when converting?

[kovidgoyal]

create an opf file and pass that to ebook-convert

But you're almost certainly misusing whatever facility your script has to call external programs, if you're seeing command line arguments incorrectly processed.

[Tactical Fart]

It's a java program. I don't think there's a work around. I can post the method that I use if you want though.

Can I get a sample opf that ebook-convert will take? I found the ones in the epubs I've made thus far. If I specify an opf, does ebook-convert make it's own based on the one specified or does the one specified receive total priority? Also how do I pass the opf to ebook-convert? Or did you mean ebook-meta?

Edit:
I found a work around. I used an opf that I extracted from an epub that ebook-convert made, striped it down so that it is very basic, manually replaced a few fields, then used ebook-meta. It only replaced the metadata that was specified in the opf. I'll just have my program construct a basic opf, and then call ebook-meta when the ebook is made. Thanks again for your help, and for this ridiculously powerful program.

[kovidgoyal]

An OPF file will be exactly like the ones you find in epubs. And no, I mean ebook-convert. If you use an OPF file, it will take the metadata from the OPF file.

[Tactical Fart]

So for the input, I target the opf instead of an "index.html"?

Edit:
I gave it a try and it worked. I was just a little nervous using a new file extension.

[MichaelJLucasWV]

thanks for the quick response, btw, calibre is BY FAR the most useful program that i have ever had the pleasure to "run across" on the great big interwebs. Seriously, FANTASTIC work here. When i saw the demo, I was literally giddy with anticipation of being able to "fix" and organize my entire ebook collection, and get it all on my new Sony prs-600. I still cant believe it does all of this. OK, im sorry, i'm finished gushing, now, a quick last question:
can i get calibre to auto-convert all ebooks i add to the library as i add them? meaning can i have it to turn every book that i add into an epub file as part of the import process? thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. and thanks for making such a great program.

[kovidgoyal]

No, calibre doesn't do auto convert

[Tactical Fart]

Something else I've noticed when using calibre. Every time I use ebook-convert, it says stuff like

Parsing file 'file6.html' as HTML
File 'file6.html' missing <head/> element

Am I supposed to include a <head> area or should I just not worry about it? It still makes the ebooks, regardless.