macOS quicklook plugin to view file using spacebar/singletap

[abe]

just a feature suggestion, it would be nice if calibre implemented an epub file preview using quicklook extensions on macOS.

currently there's no way to see a book without opening it, and there are no available quicklook plugins for epub in the EU

[kovidgoyal]

waaaaaaaaay too much work for an OS specific feature, at least for me. Though if someone is interested in building one that works with calibre, it would likely be doable by using the apple provided WKWebView to render HTML. The HTML would be extracted using

calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.oeb.iterator.book import extract_book; import sys; print(extract_book(sys.argv[-2], sys.argv[-1])[1])" /path/to/ebook/file /path/to/outputdir

Running that command will extract the book as HTML into outputdir and print out the path to the OPF file that lists all the HTML files resulting from the book. It should be trivial to parse the OPF and get the list of HTML files to display.

Whether this is fast enough for quicklook, is debatable though. You could improve its performance by writing a python script that runs a daemon to service requests avoiding the startup cost of running calibre-debug. The script can be run directly as

calibre-debug /path/to/script.py

then the script can listen for requests on STDIN or a socket and run extract_book and write the OPF path to STDOUT or the socket.

[abe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

waaaaaaaaay too much work for an OS specific feature, at least for me. Though if someone is interested in building one that works with calibre, it would likely be doable by using the apple provided WKWebView to render HTML. The HTML would be extracted using

calibre-debug -c "from calibre.ebooks.oeb.iterator.book import extract_book; import sys; print(extract_book(sys.argv[-2], sys.argv[-1])[1])" /path/to/ebook/file /path/to/outputdir

Running that command will extract the book as HTML into outputdir and print out the path to the OPF file that lists all the HTML files resulting from the book. It should be trivial to parse the OPF and get the list of HTML files to display.

Whether this is fast enough for quicklook, is debatable though. You could improve its performance by writing a python script that runs a daemon to service requests avoiding the startup cost of running calibre-debug. The script can be run directly as

calibre-debug /path/to/script.py

then the script can listen for requests on STDIN or a socket and run extract_book and write the OPF path to STDOUT or the socket.

Ahah yeah I totally understand that . Thanks again for your beautiful work , calibre can already do so much

[kovidgoyal]

And since I was here, I have created a simple server for quicklook plugin integration. With this, creating a quicklook plugin leveraging calibre should be a weekend project for someone familiar with Cocoa.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...0919840a3e5f06

[abe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And since I was here, I have created a simple server for quicklook plugin integration. With this, creating a quicklook plugin leveraging calibre should be a weekend project for someone familiar with Cocoa.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...0919840a3e5f06

Really awesome wow ! I just wouldn't know where to find a dev that knows about that