[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

[meme]

@gweminence, jesscat - thanks for all the info. I'll look into this a bit more. Sounds like Calibre isn't reporting the books as on the Kindle for some reason. Could be a timing issue, etc.

[meme]

@gweminence, jesscat - I'm still not sure why this is happening, but its not a problem with the collection creation itself.

The issue is that the plugin asks Calibre to tell it all the books in its library that are on the device once the plugin thinks that the device is connected and Calibre has read in all the book information from the Kindle. For some reason Calibre is not reading the Kindle's book list, has read the list but is ignoring it, or the plugin is asking for the book list at the wrong time. So the plugin knows all the collection/column information from Calibre but has a list of 0 books to look at. I already check the signals from calibre regarding connection and book data availability but maybe something isn't quite right in the way I check it.

I can't duplicate this yet, at least under Linux. I'll try under Windows this week. However, I've attached a test version of the plugin for you to see if this is really the issue.

The test version simply pops up an error dialog and stops the plugin if the plugin does not find any books on the device that are in Calibre. At least this way you will know that your collection information won't be correct and you can re-run it.


If you are able to reproduce the error, you might want to try running in Debug mode (click the down arrow menu attached to Preferences and select restart in debug mode. When you close Calibre the debug file will pop up). This gives a lot of information though. If you could send it to me it might help identify the issue (you may not want to post it here as it might contain a list of all your books/collections). What I would be looking for are "Kindle Collections received signal" statements to see if they are

Can you confirm your setting for Calibre's Preferences->Sending books to devices->Metadata Management?

[imdqmznh]

Originally Posted by meme

Thanks to imdqmznh's suggestion at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=641 and for the work that the thread points to especially by NiLuJe.


Modify Kindle Settings such as Margins and Fonts

You can set your horizontal justification and margin size, and even fonts without installing any hacks using this option.

Spoiler:

Before connecting your Kindle to your PC and changing any of these settings, you must press the Home key on the Kindle to go to the Home page or your changes will be ignored.


Justification

Control whether the text is left justified (ragged right edge) or fully justified (straight left and right edges). Not all books will be affected by this setting depending on how they were created. You can change the setting on the Kindle once you run the plugin and if check 'Allow user justification'.

Margin

Control the amount of space between the edge of the screen and the text. The Kindle allows you to set to a few values (fewest, fewer, default), but you can use the plugin to set other margins (e.g. 20).

Fonts

The Kindle does allow you to use a different font for your books without jailbreaking and without installing a font hack. But you need to follow a few steps so that the plugin can find your font and the Kindle can use your font.

1. Find some fonts to use.
   • The font must have 4 Truetype or OpenType files - one each for Regular, Bold, Italic, and BoldItalic variants
   • For example, DroidSerif is popular and free, available from http://www.google.com/webfonts/famil...ly=Droid+Serif (you will need to extract the 4 files from the zip file, and rename DroidSerif.ttf to DroidSerif-Regular.ttf)
2. Go to the Home screen of your Kindle, then connect your Kindle to your PC
3. Create the directory "fonts" on your Kindle at the top (e.g. E:\fonts) if it isn't there already
4. Copy the 4 font files to your Kindle's directory - you must use a specific name format, e.g. if your font is called "DroidSerif", then the 4 files in the font directory must be named as follows (use "-" not "_", and use ".ttf" even if its an OpenType font):
   
   DroidSerif-Regular.ttf
   DroidSerif-Bold.ttf
   DroidSerif-Italic.ttf
   DroidSerif-BoldItalic.ttf
   
5. Run the plugin - your font should be visible in the drop down menu for fonts. If it is not visible then check that the 4 file names are correct and in the right directory
6. Select your font, and click Save
7. Eject and Restart your Kindle

Notes:

• If you get the message "The selected item could not be opened" when you try to open a book, it means the font you selected is not compatible with the Kindle for some reason. Go to the Home screen of your Kindle, reconnect it to your PC, use the plug to select a default font, and restart your Kindle.
• You can copy any number of fonts to your Kindle's font directory. The plugin will show a list of all fonts it finds (but each font must have the 4 files with the name pattern above, e.g. MyFont-Regular.ttf, ...). Only 1 font can be used by the Kindle at a time - you will need to use the plugin and restart the Kindle to change fonts.
• To change back to a regular font, just use the "Aa" key to select "std". In fact, if you select the standard font on the Kindle menu, and want to use your custom font again, you may need to run the plugin again to re-load your custom font.
• The plugin actually copies the 4 font files to the names alt-Regular, alt-Bold, etc. and sets the preferences to use the font "alt". The Kindle only seems to recognize the "alt" name and not other names, so the plugin just copies your font files to the "alt" name when you select it.
• If you have only 3 of the 4 variants of a font, you could copy/rename one of the others, but this does not always work or look right

Font Size

The size of the text on your Kindle will depend on the font you use. You can easily set the size using the settings on the Kindle so you can see the impact.

Line Spacing

You can already control this on the Kindle, but you can use this to set more values.

Other

There are various other settings that the plugin will allow you to change, but they have no known effect.

I just updated Calibre and then Kindle Collections. Everything works like a charm, thanks meme!!!

[meme]

Originally Posted by imdqmznh

I just updated Calibre and then Kindle Collections. Everything works like a charm, thanks meme!!!

Thanks for the suggestion

[Vaesse]

First, thanks for this great plugin! I've been using it since before you removed the "Create" from the name.

Second, I have one idea that I'd love to see implemented. That is the option to tell the plugin something like "create the 'custom column' collection, also create the 'series' collection, then if there is no series, create the 'author' collection." This would DRASTICALLY cut down on the number of collections I have while being very flexible to use. It would require the ability to sort the collection creation strings and decide if they're "and" or "or" strings. And it might be a bit more complex than that... but even just that simple would be great. If this isn't clear (and I COMPLETELY understand if it's not), let me know and I'll try to restate.

And one nitpick that's not important, but would be lovely. It would be awesome for me (though others might not agree) if the "author sort" collection was per name (if, for example, I had a book by Joe and Jill, to have them collected into "Joe" and "Jill" instead of "Joe & Jill").

Again, I love the plugin. Can't imagine trying to use Calibre with my Kindle (and the ton of books I've collected over the years) without it.

[jesscat]

Originally Posted by meme

Can you confirm your setting for Calibre's Preferences->Sending books to devices->Metadata Management?

I'll attempt to reproduce in debug mode in a little bit and send or attach the logs...in the meantime, though, I have this setting set to Automatic, which was originally required for the plugin (if I'm remembering correctly, it no longer is, but I've never changed it back; doesn't seem to make much of a difference for me either way that I've noticed, at least the way I use Calibre).

EDIT: Oh, and as I think you've deduced, maybe from past posts, I am on Windows! (XP)

[ange11eyes]

I downloaded the zip file and went to install plugins, did not unzip and I get the message invalid plugin and the following

calibre, version 0.7.44
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>InvalidPlugin</b>:No valid plugin found in C:/Users/Sharon/Downloads/Kindle Collections(4).zip

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\preferences\plugins.py", line 282, in add_plugin
File "site-packages\calibre\customize\ui.py", line 377, in add_plugin
File "site-packages\calibre\customize\ui.py", line 93, in load_plugin
InvalidPlugin: No valid plugin found in C:/Users/Sharon/Downloads/Kindle Collections(4).zip

What am i doing wrong please?

[meme]

Originally Posted by Vaesse

First, thanks for this great plugin! I've been using it since before you removed the "Create" from the name.

Second, I have one idea that I'd love to see implemented. That is the option to tell the plugin something like "create the 'custom column' collection, also create the 'series' collection, then if there is no series, create the 'author' collection." This would DRASTICALLY cut down on the number of collections I have while being very flexible to use. It would require the ability to sort the collection creation strings and decide if they're "and" or "or" strings. And it might be a bit more complex than that... but even just that simple would be great. If this isn't clear (and I COMPLETELY understand if it's not), let me know and I'll try to restate.

And one nitpick that's not important, but would be lovely. It would be awesome for me (though others might not agree) if the "author sort" collection was per name (if, for example, I had a book by Joe and Jill, to have them collected into "Joe" and "Jill" instead of "Joe & Jill").

Again, I love the plugin. Can't imagine trying to use Calibre with my Kindle (and the ton of books I've collected over the years) without it.

Welcome to Mobileread (as a poster - I'm sure you like me had been reading for quite a while ) Thanks for the appreciation.

Sounds like you want another custom column with a template. I think the section in the first post in this thread on custom columns may have an example you can build on. You would mark Create for both the first and second custom column in Customize. And the second would use a template that would contain the series name and if there is no series then the author or au
thor sort name.

And for author sort, you could try using the split field in Customize for Author Sort. I'm not sure if you need to split on & or on 'and' (or if the plugin can handle splitting on 'and'). I'll test it out, but you might get to it first.

[meme]

Originally Posted by ange11eyes

calibre, version 0.7.44
What am i doing wrong please?

That's the issue right there

Upgrade to the latest version of Calbire (0.8 as of this weekend - and worth it )

[meme]

Originally Posted by jesscat

I'll attempt to reproduce in debug mode in a little bit and send or attach the logs...in the meantime, though, I have this setting set to Automatic, which was originally required for the plugin (if I'm remembering correctly, it no longer is, but I've never changed it back; doesn't seem to make much of a difference for me either way that I've noticed, at least the way I use Calibre).

EDIT: Oh, and as I think you've deduced, maybe from past posts, I am on Windows! (XP)

Yeah, the plugin needed it as Automatic when it read the cache file of calibre books that calibre saved on the Kindle. But these days the plugin reads the book list directly from calibre - which usually works better but maybe not all the time

[hrynkiw]

Listen to my story and learn from my mistake.

I was diligently working in Calibre over the weekend, adding newly-downloaded books, updating metadata, organizing, dusting, polishing... Finished my work, connected my Kindle, ran the Collections preview plugin; and got WILDLY wrong results! Half my tag-generated collections are missing. And the ones that are there are mostly wrong; generated from the wrong device, spelled wrong, prefix characters are wrong, just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Moderate panic attack; OMG what did I break? Disconnected Kindle, reconnected, re-ran preview. Still wrong. Checked the tags in Calibre, they're okay. What's going on? Upgraded Calibre, checked for plugin upgrade. Re-ran preview. STILL broken. Aw nuts. Opened the plugin, checked the config -- it's missing! WTF?

Deep calming breath, and gave myself a pep talk. It's late, you're tired, the collections on the Kindle are still okay because you've only been running the plugin preview. It's just the new books that won't be sorted properly. New books -- the ones that live in the Calibre Library called "Rough" until you've had a chance to convert them to mobi, add/update the metadata and covers, and just tonight were copied over to your main Calibre library.

The library.

I had Calibre pointed at my Rough library. Where there is no Collections plugin config. Where the tags are mostly wrong until I'm ready to move the books over to the main library.

Pointed Calibre to the main library, re-ran the Collections preview and... everything is just fine. *Whew*.

If there's a moral to this story it's probably "Don't Panic".

[nynaevelan]

thanks for the chuckle.

[xcfordan]

Excellent plugin, thank you!

One quick question/issue: in the "edit collecitons manually" window, is it possible to have the author column sort by last name instead of by first name? Same as it is done in Calibre?

[meme]

@hrynkiw -

@xcfordan - its possible, but I'm not sure about adding it. The author names are taken from the books on the Kindle - and if not available from Calibre. So it handles books that are only on the Kindle or on the Kindle and in Calibre.

There are only 2 ways to get the lastname/firstname order - either I use the Calibre field data (which only exists for books in Calibre so many books might not have values), or I apply an algorithm to generate the lastname/firstname from the author field. I probably wouldn't write this myself, although its likely that I could hook into calibre's existing function.

But then does the Edit window show both author - which exactly matches what you see on the Kindle and is the reason I list it like that - and lastname/firstname, or just one of them...

[gene_youngerman]

I have a kindle 3, that I am trying to manage using Calibre. Everything is great, but...

When I set up the split collections with a designated split character, I don't get all the collections I expect. I guess I thought that if I set up a book with two collections then the book would show up in both collections. And that any book named with either the first or second of a split name would be in the right place.

Not happening that way. What am I doing wrong?