Viewer slow first read and what are the shortcuts

[BetterRed]

Next time the viewer starts to go slow, quit calibre and then run it with the --ignore-plugins option and try View again, see ==>> Command line - calibre

BR

[theducks]

@Why
You match my typical experience

[WHY]

Originally Posted by WHY

Yes, if open the epub file directly from the file browser, it would be quick with no issue. The odd things is that opening a new book within calibre can be very slow and the library check can resolve this issue for me for the reason I don't know..

I just found that my above comment is wrong. I just added several books today, and the issue of the slow opening of the newly added occurred again. So, I took this chance to test and confirmed that opening the ebook from file explorer directly is also slow! Sorry for the confusion made.

I also observed that it seems if you wait for the first one of the newly added books' slow opening process to finish (around 40 secs in the phase of "preparing book of first read..."), then the open of other new books will become normal again with the library check trick.

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Next time the viewer starts to go slow, quit calibre and then run it with the --ignore-plugins option and try View again

Timings still as slow as before:

Originally Posted by Geremia

I bought a new graphics card with 8GB of VRAM, and ebook-viewer doesn't start any faster: 3840x2160 takes about 7 seconds, but lower resolutions take <1 sec. I'm using Nvidia's proprietary driver.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Geremia

Timings still as slow as before:

Thanks for the feedback.

I can't be bothered scrolling through 5 pages of posts, so I'll ask:

Have you tried relocating calibre's cache directory to somewhere simple e.g. c:\_calibre\cache via the relevant Environment variable? Some 3rd party gadget might be sticking its oar into it.

BTW: I use Aquile as my default viewer for ePubs, it's very similar in performance and function to the ePub viewer that was in the original Edge browser.

BR

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Have you tried relocating calibre's cache directory to somewhere simple e.g. c:\_calibre\cache via the relevant Environment variable?

still sits on "Loading book, please wait" for several seconds

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by Geremia

still sits on "Loading book, please wait" for several seconds

This is with the recent version, Calibre 5.32.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Next time the viewer starts to go slow, quit calibre and then run it with the --ignore-plugins option and try View again, see ==>> Command line - calibre

Why on earth did I suggest that, the viewer doesn't have plugins - must have been a bad hair day.

BR

[HappyCalibreUser]

New member. Joined in regards to my own slowed viewer opening. Think I found my problem, maybe it will help someone else.

Current Calibrary Library version: 5.11

Mac-mini. Latest version OS. 2.5 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5. Memory 16GB

I am not computer literate. Spouse works at Cisco as one of their top customer trouble-shooters. But rarely assists me, so I'm left to figure my own things out eventually.

In Calibre: Preferences + Behavior

Everything worked fast, opening in a split second, until one day after a few weeks of installing 5.11 I selected every choice on the Internal viewer. And yes, I waffled until a couple days ago to deselect some:
MARKDOWN
MD
PML
PMLZ
POBI
RB
SNB

I don't know why I chose those other than I don't think I'd ever need them.

After selecting those I did a complete shut down of Calibre, restart.

Where I had experienced 2 minutes to 20 minutes for a first book opening each library restart no matter the book size, for the past 48 hours of use opening/closing Calibre a number of times I have regained my speed.

I love Calibre and appreciate Kovid for the work he and everyone has put into it. Calibre is everything and more that I was struggling to try to build before I found it.

A BIG thank-you to everyone behind Calibre.

[theducks]

Use internal viewer has no real impact.

What it is for IS WHEN you have some other app you prefer for a format VIEWING. Typ is PDF (use Adobe)
Just remove the tic, and Calibre asks the OS to use its handler for that format VIEWING (the OS must know what app to use)

[BetterRed]

The only format I have checked in the Use internal viewer for: list is the format I have in Preferred output format: - which is EPUB.

If I want to view another format, e.g. MOBI, with the calibre ebook-viewer I do it explicitly via calibre's View->View Specific format->Open With tool.

BR

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by Geremia

still sits on "Loading book, please wait" for several seconds

I still get this issue even with calibre-5.99.8-x86_64.txz beta that has Qt6.

[Geremia]

Originally Posted by Geremia

I still get this issue even with calibre-5.99.8-x86_64.txz beta that has Qt6.

Here's a screencast of how painfully slow ebook-reader loads even for a tiny 9kB EPUB:


This is with Calibre 6.23, recent Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers, Linux

[Comfy.n]

My current workaround to that, on Windows, is a StrokesPlus mouse gesture (Up, over the book cover in Cover Grid), which opens the title in a third party app called Sumatra.

Before that, I had tried setting Sumatra as default viewer, and a secondary StrokesPlus mouse gesture to open internal viewer, but this didn't go well because I do frequent FTS searches, and they depend on internal viewer as default for the main formats.

A second solution I'd tried was setting the Calibre 3.48 viewer Portable as default, which is fast at opening... but doesn't have a dark theme.

[Comfy.n]

Though I should note that I never witnessed such a delay upon opening a 9k file