[GUI Plugin] Count Pages

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Fix bug where preferred input order not being correctly applied (was alphabetical instead!)
• Fix bug where LIT formats would cause file in use errors

Thanks Culex for reporting these issues.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Support change to Goodreads website for scraping page count

[JimmXinu]

@kiwidude - Have you ever thought about adding a chapter count? Could just count the TOC entries in the ncx file. I'd use it.

Jim

[TrulyInnovative]

This has been another very useful plugin, thank you very much for developing it!

I do have one small issue, though. I use the FanFictionDownLoader plugin to download fanfics to my library, and this plugin allows me to get the (presumably more accurate) word count directly from the fanfiction site in question. Thus, I only use CountPages to, well, count the pages in the fanfic. However, I also have books in my library and in this case I use CountPages to count both the words and the pages. The problem is that if I have set CountPages to count both the words and pages, it overrides the existing the values, like the word count I get from the fanfiction site. This means that I have to change the settings of the CountPages plugin based on whether I want it to count the words or not.

I wonder if it were possible to to add a preference option that would force the CountPages plugin to not override any existing values?

Also, having the chapter count available would be nice, too.

[kiwidude]

Chapter count isn't an option as I mentioned to JimmXinu a while ago on another thread, as there is no definition inside an epub of what constitutes a chapter. You can't parse the content (chapters might be just numbers or images) and you can't use the TOC (it may or may not have chapters defined in it). To be honest I don't see any value in it as a statistic either - what does a "77" chapter James Patterson novel in comparison to a "10" chapter novel by someone else mean? To me personally it means absolutely nothing, because it comes down to the length of those chapters. Which in turn are more meaningfully represented by word counts and page counts...

As for your other request about not overwriting, something I have considered for a while is as per the screenshot below. This would allow you to run the various counts in isolation, rather than having an overwrite option. Unless anyone has any better suggestion this will be the UI for the next version...

[TrulyInnovative]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Chapter count isn't an option as I mentioned to JimmXinu a while ago on another thread, as there is no definition inside an epub of what constitutes a chapter. You can't parse the content (chapters might be just numbers or images) and you can't use the TOC (it may or may not have chapters defined in it). To be honest I don't see any value in it as a statistic either - what does a "77" chapter James Patterson novel in comparison to a "10" chapter novel by someone else mean? To me personally it means absolutely nothing, because it comes down to the length of those chapters. Which in turn are more meaningfully represented by word counts and page counts...

Alright, that makes sense. And you're right, chapter count is not nearly as meaningful as word or page count.

Originally Posted by kiwidude

As for your other request about not overwriting, something I have considered for a while is as per the screenshot below. This would allow you to run the various counts in isolation, rather than having an overwrite option. Unless anyone has any better suggestion this will be the UI for the next version...

That's not bad and would be easier than the current way of doing things. However, you would still have to click the dropdown menu and the select the correct option to get what you want. If you had the overwrite-or-not option, you would only have to click the large icon of the plugin, which would then perform the correct procedure depending on what values are currently present. Of course, the best of both worlds would be having both your suggested UI and the overwrite-or-not option. This way, you could have the default option which works most of the time, but you could also select a specific option from the dropdown menu for any other cases.

[kiwidude]

To be honest I don't like the idea of an overwrite option. For 99.9% of users they run the plugin because they *want* to overwrite. It would all just get way too messy and confusing in my opinion - people not knowing or realising when their page/word count is being updated and when it isn't. Not to mention the permutations of configuration for which column they don't want overwritten in which circumstance...

You can change which option gets run on the toolbar button. And you can assign keyboard shortcuts to any of the options. Thats as far as I want to go with it - but if others feel sufficiently strongly about it they are welcome to try to persuade me otherwise...

[kiwidude]

@TrulyInnovative - ok, I changed my mind. Thinking about your comments a bit more I realised it did just need to be as simple as a single checkbox. It is turned on by default and is called 'Always overwrite an existing column count', so in your case you will be able to just untick it and job done...

[morantis]

Can it be configured to ignore blank pages.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by morantis

Can it be configured to ignore blank pages.

Blank pages have no impact on page counts. Page counts are determined using algorithms based around the number of characters in the book, the very rare situation of an html page containing no content should not affect the algorithm at all.

[TrulyInnovative]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

@TrulyInnovative - ok, I changed my mind. Thinking about your comments a bit more I realised it did just need to be as simple as a single checkbox. It is turned on by default and is called 'Always overwrite an existing column count', so in your case you will be able to just untick it and job done...

Fantastic, that should be perfect! Thanks for the quick response.

[theducks]

I would like a don't overwrite option in lieu of a Always Ask before overwrite. (the default is overwrite)

Where I would really like this type of option is the Main, Download Metadata configuration page (basically a Hands off only if filled in) per source (some are better than others )

[kiwidude]

@theducks - you have me slightly confused now . The new option has no user interactivity with it whatsoever, you set it once and forget it.

By default being turned on users who are happy with how the plugin works today will see zero difference. If however you turn it off, then what happens is the plugin looks to see whether you already have a value in the page/word count column before deciding whether to even to kick off the background job to get a count. So if you already had a page count, and selected the estimate page count option, it will straight away tell you it isn't going to do anything for that particular book. End of story, no "option" to do it anyway etc. If you decide you want to do want to overwrite a value in one specific case, then rather than going back into options and ticking the checkbox again you could just set the value to zero.

How does that fit with what you had in mind? I'm trying to avoid having more prompts - people already complain about the (unavoidable) one that comes up once the plugin has the counts and is ready to update the library...

[theducks]

OK set (and forget ) it is

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Minimum version set to calibre 0.8.51
• Performance optimisation for epubs for calibre 0.8.51 to reduce unneeded computation
• Change to calibre API for deprecated dialog which caused issues that intermittently crashed calibre
• Additional items for menu to allow doing page/word counts in isolation
• Add an 'Always overwrite existing value' checkbox (default is True), to allow users to turn off overwriting manually populated page/word counts without choosing the isolated menu option

Anyone who has read the last half dozen posts will understand most of the above. Basically you now have more granularity available in the menus to decide whether to update only the page count or word count as needed, for preserving values you have manually populated.