[GUI Plugin] Count Pages

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by ldolse

I still don't think it's safe to assume that prc is mobi - Calibre supports a number of ebook formats that were popular on PalmOS, mobi just happens to be the most popular one.

True (EReader comes to mind), but those would have a .PDB extension, as Palm datafiles should have. .PRC on Palm was supposed to be a program. AFAIK, there is no .PRC ebook that isn't a Mobi.

Still, we'll get there in the end, seeing Kiwidude's reaction

[travger]

I'ts a bit roundabout way. but seemed to work:

Changed .prc extension to .mobi
Imported to Calibre (next to prc)
Got count
Deleted mobi

To be safer, in future I'd import to second (test) library and copy/paste the count. Just in case.

[lathom]

Is there any way the plugin could have an option to allow the confirmation of import dialog to be skipped - i.e. just go ahead and update the page/word count field without additional input?

Any chance of adding pdf support?

Thanks!
-Andy

[Vaesse]

I agree on the skipping confirm. I can see maybe leaving it there for people who start the process by accident, but... isn't a new count always going to be the same (or more accurate) than an old count? And we aren't offered a side-by-side comparison, so can't imagine catching problems at this stage in the process. At minimum, it should auto-apply if the field is empty.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by Vaesse

I agree on the skipping confirm. I can see maybe leaving it there for people who start the process by accident, but... isn't a new count always going to be the same (or more accurate) than an old count? And we aren't offered a side-by-side comparison, so can't imagine catching problems at this stage in the process. At minimum, it should auto-apply if the field is empty.

I agree!

[theducks]

I believe part of the reason for a Confirmation, is Count Pages runs in background and you may be doing something else with the Library in foreground.
Count Pages needs to know when it is OK(safe) to manipulate the permanent Calibre Database

[kiwidude]

As theducks has touched on, what people (certainly non-developers at least) don't seem to realise is that for the same reasons you cannot have two Calibre instances pointing at the database, you cannot have two threads or processes updating the database at the same time. Calibre does not have any kind of pessimistic locking mechanism. The only way to "safely" update the database is to do so back on the main UI thread. Since you could be doing any sort of other operation in Calibre at the time the only way to guarantee that the database and caches are updated without any conflicts or corruption is to do so in a synchronous fashion in a way the user is guaranteed to not be doing anything else with the database at the same time - by sticking a dialog up that once you click on prevents you from doing anything else until it is done.

It pretty much nothing to do with giving you the opportunity to "cancel" an update or viewing logs in this particular plugin.

If and when Kovid ever comes up with another mechanism for queuing database updates then we can look to change this.

[Ron.]

This is a mighty fine plugin, thank you Sir!

[kiwidude]

@Ron - thx mate, glad it is working well for you.

[Ron.]

I notice if I save a book to disk it saves the page count in the opf file (which is cool) but it looks like this in the opf

<meta name="calibre:user_metadata:#pages" content="{&quot;is_category&quot;: false, &quot;is_editable&quot;: true, &quot;kind&quot;: &quot;field&quot;, &quot;is_custom&quot;: true, &quot;is_csp&quot;: false, &quot;#extra#&quot;: null, &quot;column&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;colnum&quot;: 1, &quot;rec_index&quot;: 21, &quot;search_terms&quot;: [&quot;#pages&quot;], &quot;link_column&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;label&quot;: &quot;pages&quot;, &quot;is_multiple&quot;: null, &quot;datatype&quot;: &quot;int&quot;, &quot;#value#&quot;: 501, &quot;category_sort&quot;: &quot;value&quot;, &quot;table&quot;: &quot;custom_column_1&quot;, &quot;is_multiple2&quot;: {}, &quot;display&quot;: {&quot;number_format&quot;: &quot;{0:,}&quot;}, &quot;name&quot;: &quot;Pages&quot;}"/>

do I have something configured wrong ?

[kiwidude]

Nope, that is just how custom column metadata gets written to opf files by Calibre, nothing to do with this plugin.

[Man Eating Duck]

Thanks again for a very convenient plugin!

Regarding the "FAILED TO COUNT PAGES" errors and updating: After updating to the latest 1.3.1 (from some early version, albeit one with word count, unfortunately I replaced it and don't remember exactly) I got this error with no traceback. It turned out that my custom column had moved from Word count options to Page count options, see attachment.

I don't use page count (which now had the #words column configured), and Word count suddenly had no column configured. Of course it's easy to fix if you know about it, but there was no hint about this in the error message making it a bit confusing. I am completely sure that I didn't change anything myself.

I guess this is due to a stale configuration, in config.py from the updated plugin the keys are named

KEY_PAGES_CUSTOM_COLUMN = 'customColumn'
KEY_WORDS_CUSTOM_COLUMN = 'customColumnWords'

And this suddenly became a too long post about something that's probably a non-issue

[han_32]

I installed this plugin, and I love it. No major problems. Thank you very much to developer.

Is there any way to tweak the word count presentation? As it is I copied the word count column (integer, format {0:;} and it presents word count as for example 104563 or 34512 words. i would love to truncate it, to present just how many thousand words. I tried to read the documentation on python formating but am too computer illiterate to understand. Anybody got any suggestion, please, on how to do this?

I thought of another shortcut - set up a new column, reference to the word column data, divide by 1000 and truncate, and then hide the word column and show just the column with K-words. But I can also not figure out how to make it (I read documentation, really, but my programming foundations are non-existent and can not figure it out on my own so far). Anybody can helo?

[unboggling]

Edit3: Please disregard these questions, Man Eating Duck answered downstream.

I recently started using Count Pages for page counts and love it. I have only one very minor question: Is it possible to change the format for the integer column to display the numbers aligned right somehow, if necessary with leading zeros? I spent an hour the other day messing around with {0:,} trying to get leading zero's to even things out at 4 digits, and couldn't get it to work. Maybe I just don't know enough template language yet.

Edit1,2: oops, missed the last post, or is it Python formatting language?

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by han_32

I thought of another shortcut - set up a new column, reference to the word column data, divide by 1000 and truncate, and then hide the word column and show just the column with K-words. But I can also not figure out how to make it (I read documentation, really, but my programming foundations are non-existent and can not figure it out on my own so far). Anybody can helo?

You're on the right track. This is not very elegant, but it works:

My words column is named, originally enough, #words. I add a custom column as follows:

Lookup: words1000

Column heading: 1000 words

Type: Column built from other columns

Template: {#words:'re(divide($,1000),'\..*','')'}

This gives you a plain number of thousands. Since the float is truncated by a regular expression you can add whatever suffix you want, for instance to get 100K you'd replace '\..*','' above with '\..*','K' or '\..*',' thousands'.

If you want a prefix it's also possible by using the re() function as an argument in a strcat.

Good luck