Please help beta test calibre 7

[kovidgoyal]

Hi all,

After several months of development, calibre 7 is ready for beta
testing. The headline feature is the ability to add notes to any
author/series/tags/publisher/etc.

To use this feature, right click (or ctrl click on macOS) on the author
name in the tag browser or book details panel and choose Edit notes.
After creating the note, there will be a little pencil icon next to the
author name in Book details that you can click to see the note. In the
popup that opens to see the note, there is a button you can click to
copy a calibre:// URL used to display the note. All notes in your
library can be searched by pressing Ctrl+shift+n or adding the Browse
notes tool to the toolbar. This search is a full text search. Notes
support basic HTML formatting, colors, links, images, etc.

You can also view and edit the notes via the calibre Content server.

Another new feature is that the calibre viewer has gained support for
Audio EPUB files. These are EPUB files with embedded audio, typically of
a human reading out the text. Now, when you click the Read aloud button
in the viewer controls while viewing such a file, the embedded audio is
used instead of Text to speech. Note that this may not work on Linux
because of issues with patented audio codecs but should work on both
Windows and macOS. Freely available EPUB books with embedded audio can
be downloaded here: https://www.readbeyond.it/ebooks.html

All the calibre dependencies have also been recompiled to their latest
versions, especially Qt, which I am hoping wont cause any issues, but
past experience does not lead me to be confident.

The betas are available (with version number 6.99.x) at:
https://download.calibre-ebook.com/betas/

On Windows you can install the portable version to test it alongside of
regular calibre. It is safe to run the beta on an existing library and
then switch back to regular calibre. Any notes you create will simply
not be visible to regular calibre. The only exception is if you delete
an author/tag/whatever in regular calibre, the associated note wont be
cleaned up.

Please report any issues you find in this thread. Thanks for helping.

For those of you running from source, calibre7 corresponds to the
"notes" branch, which will eventually be merged into the "master"
branch before the release of calibre7.

[un_pogaz]

Sweet, for as long as I've seen it progress on the repository, I'm waiting for it to arrive. I've already done some testing and experimentation, but now I'm going to try to push it a bit more.

By the way, among these tests, I've updated my plugin Comments Cleaner to support cleaning of Notes. Still beta, but comming up with the final Calibre 7. (Github link)

[Karellen]

Sounds great!!

I've installed the Portable version and linked to my existing library on Win10. I'll start using it instead of the release version.

[chaley]

Note: you can also create, edit, and delete notes in the tag browser using right-click or the category editors.

[ownedbycats]

Is the 6.99 database changes backwards-compatible with older versions? I'd like to test with my working library, but not if there's going to be data loss if I switch back to 6.29 for some reason (hopefully plugins remain working).

[chaley]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Is the 6.99 database changes backwards-compatible with older versions? I'd like to test with my working library, but not if there's going to be data loss if I switch back to 6.29 for some reason (hopefully plugins remain working).

Kovid answered this question in the first post

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

It is safe to run the beta on an existing library and then switch back to regular calibre. Any notes you create will simply not be visible to regular calibre. The only exception is if you delete an author/tag/whatever in regular calibre, the associated note wont be cleaned up.

Also, I have been doing this for weeks with no problems.

[ownedbycats]

Oops, I managed to accidentally skip over that

[ownedbycats]

For those worried about plugins: Everything seems to work as expected. Still, I would expect occasional Qt errors and be prepared to report them to the plugin authors.

[ownedbycats]

Possible Qt oddness in Calibre itself: In dark mode, the tooltips changed appearance.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Possible Qt oddness in Calibre itself: In dark mode, the tooltips changed appearance.

Yes, tooltips' appearance is under Qt control.

[un_pogaz]

Hmm, a handy improvement would be a way to modify the Width and Height of the images directly from the WYSIWYG editor.
Going through the code view to insert attributes directly into the tag isn't very practical.

And if you add a dialog, you can retrieve the original image size and/or perform operations like "modify image size while keep the ratio", "reset to original size"...

[Karellen]

After installing the Portable version, I linked to my existing library using Switch/Create Library>Use previously existing library at the chosen location. That all created correctly. Then I copied the contents of my Roaming folder across to duplicate my settings. All working correctly.

I then deleted the empty "Calibre Library" using "Remove Library" then deleted the Calibre Library folder in the Portable location when offered.

Because I only use a single library, I don't know if this is expected behaviour, but everytime I restart Calibre Portable, the "Calibre Library" is recreated and Calibre opens with an empty library, then I need to switch to my actual library.

Why won't it hold onto my actual library as default instead of constantly recreating the empty library?

[ownedbycats]

Yes, the Portable library recreating itself is intended. I'd just symlink/directory junction the real library onto it.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Yes, the Portable library recreating itself is intended. I'd just symlink/directory junction the real library onto it.

Ok, thanks.
I was wondering if the new .calnotes folder was forcing the recreation. But obviously not.

[Comfy.n]

I'm getting a long delay either when opening Manage Authors from the Tag Browser, or right-clicking author in Book Details -> Manage. This happens only on my main library, which is the largest one.

Upon a reinstall of stable version 6.29, Manage Authors will open instantaneously, as with my other libraries.

While troubleshooting this issue, I think I found something worth looking:



The message above happens when doing a database integrity check with the option 'Also compact the notes database':



This happens on the other libraries, as well as with an empty library I've created for test purposes with the default structure.