Calibre tips and tricks

This is an attempt to collect Calibre tips and tricks that are scattered in the forums or otherwise hard to find or poorly documented.

Operating system specific

Windows

• A shortcut to calibre.exe can be added to the Send To menu (Win+R, shell:sendto). Any files you send to Calibre will be added to the library.

Device specific

Kobo

• Calibre 4.12 or later and kobo firmware 4.20.14601 or later support series metadata sync and series view automatically
  • To remove the (now duplicate) series data from collections, go to kobo driver settings -> collections covers & uploads tab -> collecitons columns and remove series.
  • references: Kobo Shelves and Collections, forum thread
• Books downloaded from the kobo store directly to the device shouldn't be deleted from the device using calibre.
  • To remind yourself of this, tag them or add them to a collection or some variation so you remember to delete them on the device, not in calibre
  • If you do delete one from calibre, you can use settings -> device management -> repair your account
  • Side loaded books don't have this issue

Calibre main

• It's possible to copy and paste between timestamp fields, even if they're of different formats [1] (added in 4.20)

Searching

• Calibre:Regular expressions, Calibre and you- an introduction
• Saved Search/Regex Functions

Templates etc

• Plugboard, template, and custom composite column recipes

Calibre editor

Quickly view stylesheet in calibre editor

Quite often you might want to see or edit the stylesheet. The slower way to bring it up is to open the 'file browser', then cursor down below 'Text' files to 'Styles', then click on 'stylesheet.css'. It is faster to show 'choose file to edit' with Ctrl-T which brings up a dialog of files to open. Begin typing 'stylesheet' by typing in 'st' (which should be enough) and Enter. The stylesheet will appear and its tab will be to the right.

Adding chapters to editor and Table of Contents quickly

You can add a blank xhtml file which can function as a new chapter. While in the editor you go to 'file','new file'. This brings up a box into which you must type in (for example) '1234.xhtml' and this will add in an almost blank file of that name. The file will add itself in just after the file which has focus (for example, you are on '1233.xhtml') The file does not have to be totally blank. You can instruct calibre to put in as much of the preliminary heading as you want, even chapter information. You do this in 'preferences', 'editor settings', 'templates for new files'. In this manner you can set up all new additional blank files called up this way to include whatever preliminary stuff you might think important. It can even be used to place your cursor at the '%CURSOR%' location.

Finding words after 'tweak book' hyphenation via (1) 'fuzzy' in F3 Search, (2) View/Text Search, (3) File Preview

You will not find what you are looking for using 'F3 Find' if you have already hyphenated your book using 'tweak book' because the potential word break hyphens are invisibly inserted into long words. This will cause the search to miss the word entirely. With F3 search you can change the search to 'fuzzy' and this will let you find the hyphenatable word. Alternately, you can use 'tweak book' to dehyphenate the book, then search, then use 'tweak book' again to rehyphenate. Two other kinds of searches treat hyphenatable words differently: View/Text Search will not find hyphenated words, but the Search in File Preview will.

Change font size of 'file preview' in editor with Ctrl key and trackpad

You can change the font size of the main editing window in Preferences. If you want to change the size of the font in the editor's 'file preview' you do not have to go to Preferences. Hold down Ctrl and change font size in the 'file preview' larger or smaller while sliding up/down trackpad right edge.

Breaking word strings at slash selectively

when a string of words is separated by a space the string will break as needed at the space but if a string of words is separated by only the '/' character the string will not break. You may run into a sequence like 'red/green/yellow/blue parrot' and you may feel uncomfortable changing that to a more manageable 'red/ green/ yellow/ blue parrot'. You can can add 'find' and 'replace' '/' with '/' followed by '<wbr/>' The '<wbr/>' will appear in the editor but not in the 'file preview'. Another way to do this is to use the snippet editor to create a 'zero width space' using '/' as a trigger. While in the editor, just after having typed in '/' follow the '/' with 'ctrl j' and the snippet will convert the '/' into '/' followed by a 'zero width space'. The text will now break as needed.

Updating differences in calibre's 'E-book Viewer', 'File preview' of the editor, and 'PDF viewer'

If you have already converted an EPUB file to PDF using calibre's conversion feature you may want to cross-compare appearance of PDF and EPUB. If you have open editor, E-book viewer, and PDF viewer changes are handled differently. Any change made in the editor (even before saving the file) is immediately reflected in the editor's 'file preview'. When you save the change the PDF also alters to reflect the change. The EPUB file does not change until you update it with 'Ctrl-r'

Editing image thumbnails in Reports

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  Reports

• 

  Editor

In Editor/Tools/Report/Images you can click on an image's thumbnail to edit it. The image thumbnails in the Report cannot be enlarged while in the report. After you have clicked on an image you have to close the 'Report' to do the editing. You cannot just suspend the Report to do this, you must actually close it. As soon as you close the Report window, the Editor window will now show the image in an open file tab and you can edit it in the editor. The most common type of editing is 'trimming' and you do this by selecting the the region you wish to retain then clicking the trim icon.