14 DAY TRIAL // Calibre 1.30, the eBook reader and management software developed for multiple platforms, including Linux, has been released with new drivers and a few new interesting features.
If you are a Calibre user and fan then you know that the application gets an update once a week and that the developer manages to squeeze a large number of new features and changes from one version to another. The current 1.30 release does exactly that, even if it's not one of the biggest updates we've seen.
A very important feature of Calibre is the ability of the user to manage the cover of the books, to edit and to manually replace them. Now, an option has been added to the application to show covers with their original aspect ratio. Calibre will no longer resize the covers so that they all have the same width and height. The option to do this can be found in Preferences->Look & Feel->Cover Browser.
A number of other important features has been added to Calibre 1.30. For example, JavaScript is now being used inside header and footer templates for the PDF output, when the application is generating an inline ToC, a class attribute is now added to all <ul> tags, and abstract named sockets are now being used on Linux for IPC (this should avoid the use of temporary files for sockets).
Also, drivers have been added for the N800 and N950 Nokia MeeGo tablets, it's now possible to save normal mode searches, import and export functionality has been added for the Edit function, and an option to specify the language when adding books has been added.
It was to be expected that the developer would also fix some very important bugs. For example, the files with garbage bytes are now being handled in their table of contents (for the AZW3 format), text from some paragraphs is now being converted for DOCX files, the application no longer errors out due to a plugin problem, and worker processes have been fixed on Linux systems with bash that is at least at version 4.3.
If you’ve decided to compile your own version of Calibre, be warned. It has a lot of dependencies and can be quite tricky. Fortunately, the developer also provides a complete list of dependencies, if you feel brave enough.
A lot more information can be found in the complete announcement, and you can also check out our review of Calibre and download Download Calibre 1.30 from Softpedia.