14 DAY TRIAL // A new version of the Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software, has been released and features even more options to edit books.
Calibre is mostly used as an eBook converter and reader, but it can do a lot of other things as well. One of the latest features added to the application is the ability to edit books, which is something that very few other apps can do.
As you can imagine, editing books is actually a very complete operation and the Calibre dev has already made numerous fixes and changes to this feature. Today's update is mostly about book editing, but there are also a few other changes as well.
According to the changelog, a new tool that can be used to easily add a cover to the book has been implemented and it automatically generates the HTML wrapper and takes care of marking the covers files as covers in the OPF. This is very helpful, especially for people with large libraries with books with no covers.
Also, the performance of inline spell checking has been improved and that is noticeable when editing large HTML files (over 100KB in size), the syntax highlighting feature now runs in the background, reducing user interface latency when editing large files, a new function (group_re) has been added to use regular expressions with groups, a check for HTML files with non UTF-8 encoding declarations has been implemented, and an option to make filtering the word list case sensitive has been added.
The developer also made a number of other improvements. For example, the integration with ebook.de broken has been fixed, the dc:rights metadata is now preserved during a conversion, non-BMP unicode characters are no longer causing matching tag highlighting to be slightly off on Linux platforms, and an error that occurred if an HTML file linked to a missing stylesheet has been corrected.
If you've decided to compile your own build of Calibre, be warned. It has many dependencies and it can be quite tricky. Fortunately, the developer also provides a complete list of dependencies, if you feel brave enough. He also has a very handy way of installing the application by entering a single command in the terminal, which can be found in the download section.
If you don't want to compile Calibre on your own, the developer offers a simple command line that takes care of the entire installation, making the whole process a lot smoother. You can also check out our review of Calibre and download Calibre 1.42 from Softpedia, but keep in mind that this is just the source.