disable tooltips by cursor

[Sean Piercy]

When I'm viewing a page in the "viewer" window, I keep getting a tooltip by my cursor popping up. It's not really intrusive but you should definitely be able to disable it somewhere. It's more annoying than anything when my mouse is over some text and there's a box blocking part of a paragraph I'm trying to read. Hopefully you can fix this soon....

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The book you are viewing has defined tooltips. The calibre viewer does
not show tooltips of its own accord. You will need to remove the
tooltips from the book, by removing the title/alt attributes from the
tags.

 status invalid

[outre99 (outre99)]

Hi Kovid. First of all thanks for a great tool.
However, I can't help but disagree with your response above. The ebook reader presents the reading experience and should be able to control what is shown. Those tooltips are very annoying and sounds like are easy to disregard. Asking users, a lot of whom are not very technical, to reformat the whole ebook just to remove these unnecessary tooltips is rather unfair.
I would even argue that the default behavior would be to ignore the title/alt tags in the reader because the focus there should be on the visible content. That way you wouldn't even need to create a new UI setting to turn it off.
Please consider adding this fix to the next release because the current behavior makes reading books in Calibre on the computer very frustrating.
Thanks in advance.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

You might not like tooltips -- that does not mean everyone does not like them. Indeed, in the ~ 10 yrs of calibre's existence there have been remarkably few instances of people asking for removal of tooltips, this is really the only one I can recall. Perhaps because:

1) Tooltips are not very common in books
2) They dont show up unless you are using the mouse, and there is not much call to use the mouse when reading, especially since most reading happens on touch screen devices

[outre99 (outre99)]

But some books, like computer manuals, are read on the computer screen while going trough code exercises. When reading on the computer it's natural to keep a mouse cursor on the book page being read. It's very distracting to have these tooltips popping up. It would be one thing if there was some useful information in them. But they are just showing the title of the current section, which is absolutely not needed. Also it would not be as bad if the tooltips would go away after some time. But they don't and require another click to dismiss. So you got a feature that doesn't have any useful value but creates noticeable frustration for the users who do read on the computer screen. And it's easy to remove. Why not do so?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Once again, they are useless in *your* book. Not in every book. If they are useless in a particular book, the correct solution is to remove them from that book, not everywhere.

I suggest you dont jump to conclusions about how easy or difficult something is to do, unless you have actually implemented the code to do it. The only way I can think of achieving this is to remove all title/alt attributes, when the HTML is loaded, which imposes a performance cost on every calibre user, to benefit a rather dubious edge case.

[Eli Schwartz (eschwartz)]

> But some books, like computer manuals, are read on the computer screen
> while going trough code exercises. When reading on the computer it's
> natural to keep a mouse cursor on the book page being read. It's very
> distracting to have these tooltips popping up.

Alternatively, don't hover over the images that have alt attributes? I
mean, personally I usually use the keyboard to turn pages in the E-Book
viewer, but even using the mouse the alt attribute for an image will
only show up when you are focusing on that image...

(And ebooks that are merely full-page images of the paper book are just
badly-made. Regardless of whether they are textbooks/manuals or novels.
So once again, calibre is not really going to be modified to cater
*exclusively* to the use-case of badly-made ebooks.)

[outre99 (outre99)]

Apologies for not explaining clearly. There are no images involved in this book. Hovering over any part of the book shows a tooltip with the name of the book section over which the cursor hovered. This means that there is no place on the book page that is safe from these unnecessary tooltips. The pages are text and not images.

Here are book details:

Title: Learning GraphQL and Relay
Formats: EPUB
Path: Click to open
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Title Sort: Learning GraphQL and Relay
Date: 18 Feb 2017
uuid: 61c33203-33a1-4aab-b68f-b2a46eed0eb9
id: 105
Modified: 10 Mar 2017
Size: 8.78MB
Languages: English

[outre99 (outre99)]

Out of curiosity, what are the cases where tooltips are useful when reading an e-book?

[outre99 (outre99)]

Some of the code examples can get long or can be split between several section so it is preferable to use continuous mode and scroll up and down instead of switching from page to page. It is naturally done with a scroll wheel but unfortunately the tooltips get in the way. I understand that these days it's an edge case, but it does take away from user experience in Calibre, which i thought you would want to be aware of. If there's a clear need for these tooltips than perhaps a user controlled option to turn them off can satisfy all scenarios.

[outre99 (outre99)]

since the issue is not with image alt tags do you have any suggestions on how to stop Calibre from displaying section tooltips?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

I never claimed the issue was with alt attributes, and once again, the only
way to accomplish this is to remove the title attributes from all
tags, which is fairly trivial to do using a search and replace in the
calibre editor or in a calibre conversion.

[Thiago Neves (thiagoneves50)]

I also find the tooltips to be extremely annoying, as I read on the PC and use the mouse to highlight text.

A option to disable it would be very helpful.
Thanks!!

[John Smith (leeua)]

I agree with the previous contributors. The program is great! However, the impossibility of turning off the tooltips is very annoying, especially when it comes to working with technical literature and constantly driving the cursor over the text.
Of course, I might want to remove the tooltips from the book, but the book is just a data source and it would be logical to provide an option in the program that processes these data and shows the user than to change the raw source.
Well, that's just my own opinion.

[primaeval (primaeval-paul)]

Please add an option to disable tooltips. I use the mouse cursor to Speed Read and it is very distracting to have them pop up all over the place.

[David (blitzin4)]

First time user here. I had just installed Calibre today, Thank you for your hard work, it shows. I got super excited when using the full-screen option and finding that 'flow' is enabled by default on my monitor. And it saves your position. Where has this thing been all my life?

In fact, right now if you type 'best ebook reader in linux' Calibre is the first picture you see. This thing is awesome, I'm even wondering why I haven't seen Calibre as the default pdf reader on most distros or why I've never heard of it before.
https://www.google.com/search?q=best+ebook+reader+in+linux

Tried it today and on all 3 formats, mobi, pdf, and epub I got this tooltip as mentioned in the title. Maybe ebook creators are making it more and more common for this 'alt text' field to appear all over the place to be more friendly to people with poor eyesight or to be more ARIA compliant? The book I'm trying to read is the ebook version of Pro Git available on git-scm.com
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 (right side of the page has links for all 3 formats)

My experience with Calibre was 'omg this program is awesome' to 'thats annoying how to I stop that' to 'I looked in the settings and theres no mention of tooltips there' to 'google bringing me to this launchpad' to 'uninstall calibre'

I love books and even after spending a few dozen minutes using Calibre, I could see how I would love it just as much. That tooltip is just too dang distracting to my book reading experience. I hope you would reconsider adding an option for users to disable this tooltip. Maybe allow the option to auto-remove this 'alt text' field when copying the file to the calibre library? I don't know. I'm not going to act like I know how the program works or the best way to implement this feature, I only hope that you reconsider revisiting this in the future.

Thank you.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The only way to remove tooltips is to remove them from the source book. WebKit which calibre uses, does not provide any other way to do that. And I have already said how that can be accomplished in calibre, using either the editor or conversion. I could certainly have the editor do it automatically, but since this issue affects only a small subset of books, technical books, I think the appropriate solution is to simply remove them from the books in question before reading.

[Charles Gunawan (peacech)]

Hi,

Would it be possible to write a plugin that runs a javascript snippet when the viewer is launched?

If that is not possible, is it possible then to create a plugin that postprocess the temporary HTML files when viewing an epub file?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The viewer supports plugins, see the calibre forums for examples.

[Charles Gunawan (peacech)]

Thanks, it works.

To anyone that want to hide the tooltip in the viewer, save the attached file to an empty directory, then run

calibre-customize -b .

in that directory.

[Eli Schwartz (eschwartz)]

Cool, glad you found something that works for you. ;)

If you want you can create a new thread in the calibre forums with your plugin attached, and it could be added to the official index of plugins to make it easier for others to download. See the Plugins subforum for examples of how to get your plugin suitably indexed.

[Amr El Tonsy (amr-el-tonsy)]

Press f11 to enter full screen mode and the issue will be solved.
Got it by trial and error.
Happy reading everyone :)