Hacks X-Ray file generator for Kindle Touch

[Ephemerality]

Originally Posted by mjwilson

Since there's been a bit of interest, I thought I'd upload the latest 'work-in-progress' version of the Calibre plug-in.

Nice. PM me if there's anything you need on my end of things.

[mjwilson]

Originally Posted by arad26

I tried to make an x-ray with this new plugin and failed. This error message:
XRAY generation failed...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre_plugins.xray_generator.xrayaction", line 208, in run
File "calibre_plugins.xray_generator.xrayaction", line 247, in _generate_xray
File "calibre_plugins.xray_generator.xrayaction", line 550, in rawml
IndexError: list index out of range

Thanks for the feedback. Is that for all books or just some? (or did you only try on one book?)

[arad26]

i tried the plugin with 3 different books and it was the same error.

[mjwilson]

Originally Posted by arad26

i tried the plugin with 3 different books and it was the same error.

I have a book here which fails with the same error so I should be able to find out what's going wrong.

[kindleloh]

[QUOTE=Ephemerality;2481827]That is the intended function. The alias file is there to add extra terms to be matched within the book.

Hi Ephemerality,

I have understand the function and I wanted to use the function, but it works not as you describes it. After canceling the x-ray process (choice aliases question with 'N') I edited the generated aliases file. Then I restart the x-ray process. The console announce the usage of the edited aliases file, but use instead the shelfari content.

kindleloh

[mjwilson]

Hopefully this newer version is better.

[thomass]

Originally Posted by mjwilson

Hopefully this newer version is better.

why don't you post this on Calibre's plugin forum ?

[mjwilson]

It seemed premature before it's really working.

[arad26]

Originally Posted by mjwilson

Hopefully this newer version is better.

It is working great now, no errors so far with 2 books .

[Ephemerality]

Originally Posted by kindleloh

I have understand the function and I wanted to use the function, but it works not as you describes it. After canceling the x-ray process (choice aliases question with 'N') I edited the generated aliases file. Then I restart the x-ray process. The console announce the usage of the edited aliases file, but use instead the shelfari content.

kindleloh

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. It will use the edited file for aliases, then download the character list and descriptions from Shelfari, then scan the book for those characters and the aliases that were defined.
Or do you mean that after it processed the book, the X-Ray file doesn't contain any excerpts from the aliases that you used? Posting the log, alias file, and which book may help if this is what's happening.

[pirl8]

Originally Posted by Ephemerality

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. It will use the edited file for aliases, then download the character list and descriptions from Shelfari, then scan the book for those characters and the aliases that were defined.
Or do you mean that after it processed the book, the X-Ray file doesn't contain any excerpts from the aliases that you used? Posting the log, alias file, and which book may help if this is what's happening.

I've fiddled a little with the command-line version you put on GoogleCode.

Since it relies on Shelfari, it can quite obviously be actually useful for english books only. However, I'm quite confident it could be easily adapted for other languages.

Let me explain what I mean.

I tried to create the X-Ray file with "Incontro con Rama", which is the italian translation of "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

Character names are mostly the same in the italian version, and indeed the generated X-Ray file mostly works.

However some places and names are translated differently.

For example, the Italian translations for "Dr. Perera", Rome", "Paris", "Moscow" and "Cylindrical Sea" are "Dottor Perera", "Roma", "Parigi", "Mare cilindrico" and "Mosca".

If I add the translation to the "xyz.aliases" file as an alias for the corresponding english character name everything is OK, but the english name is shown in the X-Ray window of my Kindle, while it's actually never used in the book.

If I add italian character names (which are obviously not provided by Shelfari) they're skipped. If I delete english entries they're added back by XRayBuilder (and no match for those terms is found within the book).
Other infos are automatically detected in the shellfary page and there's no way for overriding them.

It would be nice if XRayBuilder could dump all those infos to some UTF8 text file which could then be manually edited, and to have an option to load it overriding shelfari.

Something like:

Spoiler:

[main]
whatever = ...

[description]
description = At first, only a few things ... behind a Raman airlock door.

[synopsis]
description = Spacemen explore alien spaceship

[characters]
Norton = "Commander of spaceship Endeavour", "alias1", "alias2", ...
Rama = The mysterious flying object
...

[quotes]
quote1 = "..."

[locations]
Cylindrical Sea = "", "alias1", "alias2"
New York = "An artificial island in the cylindrical sea", "alias1"
Rome = "", "alias1"
...

Could this be possible?

[Ephemerality]

Originally Posted by pirl8

I've fiddled a little with the command-line version you put on GoogleCode.

Hi there, I got your email as well but hadn't had a chance to respond to it.
I was thinking about different options and the first thought I had was to have a feature that replaces the original character's name (the one from Shelfari) with the first alias, so:
"Billy the Kid,Senor Billy,Bill,etc"
would end up dropping the "Billy the Kid" entirely and replacing it with "Senor Billy" on the Kindle.

However, if you wanted fully-translated descriptions as well, dumping the whole thing to a file and reading it back later might be the simplest way to go.

I think Shelfari allows translations to be added to the site as well, which means you could have a totally separate entry for the translated version. Otherwise anyone else who wants to have the book X-Ray Enabled would have to write the descriptions themselves.

I don't have time to add the feature in right now, though. Sometime in the next month I might, but if you/someone wants to give it a go, I could certainly take the patch file and add it to the repo.

[pirl8]

Originally Posted by Ephemerality

Hi there, I got your email as well but hadn't had a chance to respond to it.

I wrote to you via e-mail because I missed your nickname here (didn't want to bother you). But then I found it and wrote a reply to this thread because I thought it could be an interesting feature for everybody.

Unfortunately I don't actually have the skills to help you with coding but in case you're going to implement this feature I would be glad to help you with testing!

P.S.
I tried adding an italian translation on Shelfari an then creating an X-Ray file: it works perfectly.

[vitalij]

Originally Posted by pirl8

I tried adding an italian translation on Shelfari an then creating an X-Ray file: it works perfectly.

How did you do this?
I would like to do the same thing for german translation.

[pirl8]

Originally Posted by vitalij

How did you do this?
I would like to do the same thing for german translation.

Quick and dirty way:

1. Log in to shelfari with your amazon account
2. Click on the books tab and search for any
3. At the bottom of the page you will find a note "If you can’t find the book you’re looking for, create a new book. If you see duplicate books, combine them"
4. Click "create a new book"
5. Follow directions

At the end you should have your language edition of the book. Still looking how to add the translation to an existing book, but this not needed to run XRayBuilder.

Then download XRayBuilder from googlecode, unpack it into a dir of your choice.
I wasn't able to run it by dragging and dropping the mobi file on it so I did it via CMD (actually I don't like Win CMD when dealing with very long prompts and command lines and I useConEmu or Console which are truly resizable).

• Run the tool passing the book as an argument.
• Enter your shelfari URL
• CTRL-C when it asks if you're ok with the aliases downloaded from Shelfari
• Enter the ext directory and edit the "yourbook.aliases" file as described on the readme file (It seems to me that aliases are case sensitive - check it just in case) and save
• Run again the previous command and press "Y" or "Enter" when needed
• At the end you should have an out directory with your xray file
• Copy the xray file to your kindke device into the yourbook.sdr folder

When you open the menu while reading your book you should now find the "X-Ray" tab.