Problem with conversion epub to mobi

[user_none]

I honestly don't know what to tell you at this point. Dictionary look ups are near instant for me.

[johnnyb]

Then my UK Kindle must either be totally different or my Calibre 0.8.3 must be totally different...
(would it be possible to integrate kindlegen in Calibre btw? would that be sth you would want to do?)

Ah one last thing: how does the indexing actually work, could it be that some of the dictionaries I have on my Kindle mess with Calibre in some way (some Oxford ones I bought some years ago)... I tried loading them through Calibre and they were broken (also didnt open in Calibre), sideloading made them work perfectly...

Edit2: haha yeah that was the problem, for some reason, the dictionary index must have been overloaded causing dictionary lookup to slow down (and only in the case of these Oxford dictionaries)... Still, since this is a problem occurring only with Calibre converted eBooks I still insist this is a problem with your conversion plugin...

Edit3: and I also found the reason for the long indexing that occurs... Calibre cant deal with the dictionaries I loaded onto my Kindle... when they're gone it's almost instantly ready, as soon as I load them onto my Kindle, it takes 40 min+ to index (even with just one of them)... I guess this is where the problem is to be located, Calibre is not able to deal with the dictionaries and some indexing problem occurs and its non-standard mobi indexing interferes and makes books converted with Calibre slow... (really not sure if you wanna do sth against that)

Edit4: actually it seems, indexing takes less long with not so many of these dictionaries and lookup is faster (though slower than without them)... Is there actually a way to reconvert these dictionaries without losing their dictionary function? Just to try if they can be optimized as to work better with Calibre books?

[johnnyb]

Guys, have you ever looked into this again... Try loading like 10 or 20 dictionaries on your device and then try lookup... Words pop up instantly for Amazon books and take considerably longer (the more dictionaries the longer, up to 5 or 6 seconds) for Calibre converted mobis... (assuming there's a Calibre index for the dictionaries present) I can only guess that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way calibre converts to mobi and I would love to see this fixed... Should I file a bug report or will you just ignore it as irrelevant?

[kovidgoyal]

It will be ignored. Frankly, I have absolutely no desire to spend more of my life reverse engineering Amazon's crappy format in order to support the use case of having 10 dictionaries on your device. Patches welcome.

[johnnyb]

Thanks for your answer Kovid... Very straightforward but also very sincere...
On another note, would it be possible to provide the infrastructure to integrate the kindlegen tool directly into Calibre, preferably with the epub-strip Python script...
So people could decide to use either your mobi plugin or download the kindlegen thing, point Calibre to its location and use this... This would be a nice compromise and save you a lot of trouble adjusting your plugin to future changes to the format... After all, mobi IS a proprietary format and I guess it's an awful lot of work to maintain functionality already...

[kovidgoyal]

kindlegen has various limitations that make it rather unsuitable for use as calibre's MOBI output backend. But it should be trivial to make a third party plugin to do this if you wanted to.