[GUI Plugin] Modify ePub

[motherat]

Greetings,

thank you, everyone who's (been) involved, for this excellent plugin. :-)

I have a (quick?) question concerning the two available options for metadata: "Update metadata" does what it says and updates various relevant values, but it also replaces all dc:subject entries with my own custom tags. Now, "Remove non-dc-metadata" is, as I understand it, meant to remove a bunch of extra metadata and strip the whole thing down to a clean and somewhat bare-bones opf instead. Shouldn't it then also remove custom tags?

[BetterRed]

In calibre the 'tags' column maps to dc:subjects, the 'comments' maps to dc:description etc.

[motherat]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

In calibre the 'tags' column maps to dc:subjects, the 'comments' maps to dc:description etc.

Yes. That's not what I'm asking, exactly, though I suppose there's no real way to circumvent what I've described above without putting one's own tags into a custom column.

One more question:

After having removed non-dc metadata with the plugin, opfs look as expected inside Calibre. However, when I open the opf of a modified and freshly exported epub with an external text editor, I'm still seeing a whole bunch of Calibre-specific metadata. For example, there's meta name="calibre:title_sort", meta name="calibre:user_categories", meta name="calibre:user_metadata:xyz", etc.

Is this working as intended? Or am I doing something wrong, maybe? ("Update metadata" is unchecked.)

Edit: To answer my own question, I think I found the culprit. In Calibre's "Saving books to disk" options, there's a checkbox for updating metadata on export. Once I unchecked this, opfs started looking quite a bit cleaner.

[BetterRed]

FWIW: I have a #admin_tags/Admin Tags tag-like custom column.

I'm an OCD minimalist, so after running Modify ePub I strip the the subjects, description and most identifiers from the ePub opf either 'by hand' or with Sigil's Metadata Edit tool.

BR

[motherat]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

FWIW: I have a #admin_tags/Admin Tags tag-like custom column.

I'm an OCD minimalist, so after running Modify ePub I strip the the subjects, description and most identifiers from the ePub opf either 'by hand' or with Sigil's Metadata Edit tool.

BR

Thank you for the advice; using a custom column for tags does indeed seem to be the cleanest option here. Like you, I'd prefer to also leave out the description and some other metadata, but I'm not fussed enough to do it by hand -- yet.

Small observation: Apparently, the custom column cannot simply be named "Tags", as that heading's already used by the default column. But using Cyrillic letters as a replacement works and doesn't seem to bother Calibre. I've named my column "Тags", with a Cyrillic Т, and so far, nothing's exploded.

[silatiw]

KiwiDude, I started using your plug. Works very well.
I wanted to translate Modify ePub into my native language. There is a fr.po file (empty BTW) in the / translations / directory and I used it because default.po is missing. However, Modify ePub doesn't use my .mo file. I did it on Poedit.
When I translated the other plugins everything was fine.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by silatiw

KiwiDude, I started using your plug. Works very well.
I wanted to translate Modify ePub into my native language. There is a fr.po file (empty BTW) in the / translations / directory and I used it because default.po is missing. However, Modify ePub doesn't use my .mo file. I did it on Poedit.
When I translated the other plugins everything was fine.

Looking at the plugin code, the translation work has only been partly done. Not all displayed strings are translatable. And, the plugin does not actually load the translations. Which is why what you have done is not working.

[silatiw]

Thank you for the information. I thought that if there is a folder / translations / and there is a French .po and .mo file in it, I would be able to translate the plugin into my language without any problems.

[DyckBook]

@kiwidude Got a question about using the Modify ePub plugin.

I have version 1.6.3 installed. There is an option under HTML & Styles to append extra CSS. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to provide the extra CSS. Checking this option and clicking OK returns a message box that "Modify ePub failed". "No files were updated".

Curiously, opening the help file from within the plugin shows help for all the options EXCEPT append extra CSS.

How do I provide the extra CSS to include and how do I indicate which CSS file should be modified?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by DyckBook

@kiwidude Got a question about using the Modify ePub plugin.

I have version 1.6.3 installed. There is an option under HTML & Styles to append extra CSS. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to provide the extra CSS. Checking this option and clicking OK returns a message box that "Modify ePub failed". "No files were updated".

Curiously, opening the help file from within the plugin shows help for all the options EXCEPT append extra CSS.

How do I provide the extra CSS to include and how do I indicate which CSS file should be modified?

Looking at the code, modify_epub adds the "Extra CSS" found in Preferences / Common options / Look & feel / Styling tab. It appears that the function adds this CSS to each html file in the ebook. For me, beyond this is speculation.

See posts
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ss#post2522592

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ss#post2743006

And a few other posts found by searching for "extra CSS" (without the quotes) in this thread.

[DyckBook]

@Chaley Thanks for the quick reply.

As usual I find the answer--not after looking for hours everywhere I can think of--but immediately after posting a request for help. I found the answer (exactly as you suggested) by reading the changelog.txt for the plugin. Thanks for your help.

Don't know how to get in touch with the author, other than this thread, but perhaps the help file could be updated with this information.

[davidfor]

Unfortunately, @kiwidude is not around here any more. The maintenance of the plugin is done by others as they have time and interest. The tooltip for the option does tell you what is happening, but, it would be good to have the help updated. If you want to fix it, we can arrange for the update to be released.

[DyckBook]

Originally Posted by davidfor

If you want to fix it, we can arrange for the update to be released.

I've modified the help file. In addition to adding a help reference, I cleaned up some special characters that weren't displaying properly for me.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by DyckBook

I've modified the help file. In addition to adding a help reference, I cleaned up some special characters that weren't displaying properly for me.

Modify Epub version 1.6.4 beta. The only change to include the new help file.

to @DyckBook.

EDIT: Changes released in version 1.7.0

[chaley]

Beta supporting the upcoming calibre 6 w/Qt6. It should still be as compatible as before with previous calibre releases.

EDIT: Released