Beta testing calibre 4

[kovidgoyal]

Hi all,

Finally after almost a year of working on it, calibre 4 is mostly ready. The big change is the complete replacement of Qt WebKit with Qt WebEngine, as the former is no longer maintained. This means that various parts of calibre had to be re-written, including the viewer, the editor preview panel, PDF Output, the book details panel, the comments editor, the ToC editor, etc.

The biggest user visible change is in the viewer, which now shares a codebase with the in-browser viewer. It's interface has been changed to emphasize book text and not the controls/bars. I had hoped to add support for annotations, but it took me so long just to re-write all these parts of calibre, that I decided to release 4.0 first and work on adding annotations after 4.0. One nifty new feature in the viewer is the Lookup functionality, which works inside a side panel in the viewer. You open the panel and simply double click on any word to look it up in a dictionary or search engine.

The next big change is in the book details panel and comments editor which now use Qt's Rich Text widget rather than an actual browser to render comments. This means that the level of support for advanced HTML or CSS has decreased, but on the other hand resource usage has improved. I have tried to keep things as compatible as possible, but it is likely that if you use some types of advanced CSS in your comments it may not render as before.

In PDF output, the way the output is generated has been completely changed, however most things should just continue to work as before, with the exception of header and footer templates, which will need their HTML code to be adjusted slightly, details here: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...rs-and-footers

Finally, you might notice that the size of the calibre downloads has approximately doubled, blame Qt WebEngine.

I would appreciate it if some of you would try the beta for a while and report any issues. It is perfectly safe to upgrade to the beta and then downgrade back to mainline releases, if you find problems. In particular, feedback on the new viewer would be useful since now is the time to make changes to it, before a public release.

Report issues in this thread, please.

Betas are available at: https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/

Thanks

[theducks]

Wow!
You are right, the viewer is different. I am not sure if I like the spinning gear between sections (next file loading). Can that be suppressed?

Details (comments) are missing when I click for the details (brown book on the status bar). They ARE there if I use the Info tool.


(more playing for now. more comments later)

[kovidgoyal]

The spinning gear is there in the current viewer as well (it's not a gear but a spinning wheel in an overlay) but otherwise is the same. Something has to show up between file loads.

Comments are not showing up in the book details panel?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

T
Comments are not showing up in the book details panel?

That is correct. Only the other metadata fields (thos that were on the left edge of that pane.
They are there in the Edit panel
They are there in the I(nfo) box

[kovidgoyal]

Strange, are comments enabled in Preferences->Look & feel->Book details?

[theducks]

Lookie
As you can see there in 2 places (same book)

[kovidgoyal]

Ah ok you have the setting to display it horizontally that is indeed a bug, it is being displayed below rather than to the side

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Ah ok you have the setting to display it horizontally that is indeed a bug, it is being displayed below rather than to the side

Have you fixed this already!!

I have horizontal book details, and I can see the built in Comments and my custom long text column Notes.

Would it be possible to put the word Comments above the Comments - the words Notes and Blurb you see below are my custom column Column header values



BR

[gbm]

Running Linux Mint 19.2 can not change fonts in the E-book viewer or the Preview section of the Editor.

bernie

Good night early day tomorrow.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Have you fixed this already!!

I have horizontal book details, and I can see the built in Comments and my custom long text column Notes.

Would it be possible to put the word Comments above the Comments

Attachment 173323

BR

You are most correct.
After I made the pane huge (I have always had it like the Image).
They simply were underneath, not alongside as they were before.

[kovidgoyal]

@BR and @theducks The comments not appearing side-by-side happens only if you have the setting to have them float in Preferences->Look & feel->book display -- because the Qt widget does not support floating. I have fixed it by removing that setting, now it will always display in fixed columns. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...d6f3abeaa4fa37

@BR: The comments title not appearing has nothing to do with this beta, you can open a ticket for it after the beta process.

[BetterRed]

Can't find a Print button in new Viewer.

The Lookup sidebar feature is brilliant, I especially like the fact that it's sidebar stays in place.

How about an option for a 'scrolling footnotes-in-sidebar'. IMO one-at-a-time footnotes are inadequate and putting them in a popup is a gimmick.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Yeah print is gone, convert to PDF instead. I might look into restoring it at some point, but it is not really a priority.

As for a scrolling list of footnotes, that might be doable, at least for books that mark their footnotes semantically, as opposed to the viewer just detecting them using heuristics, but this is definitely something to look into post 4.0

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

You are most correct.
After I made the pane huge (I have always had it like the Image).
They simply were underneath, not alongside as they were before.

I have How to display text in the 'Narrow' layout: set to Columns - because I have a Wide screen

@Kovid - This might have been fixed in a version 3.nn release and I didn't notice. I would sometimes see weird alignments in horizontal book details - especially odd splitting of multi word list type columns (e.g. peoples names). I didn't report it because a) it was cosmetic, and b) I couldn't see a pattern.

But now I'm looking for them - they've gone - i.e. it's fixed

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by gbm

Running Linux Mint 19.2 can not change fonts in the E-book viewer or the Preview section of the Editor.

bernie

Good night early day tomorrow.

Font changing in th viewer works, except that the standard font was hardcoded to sans-serif, so it will work only if you change the sans serif family. This and the editor font settings not working will be fixed in the next beta