pdf-hyphenate no longer hyphenating pdfs

[jimbojw]

calibre version 4.4 (git 163b2dfd2d via CALIBRE_DEVELOP_FROM)
OS: ubuntu

The --pdf-hyphenate option seems to no longer hyphenate long words when generating PDFs from HTML/epub input.

Command:

  ebook-convert wealth-excerpt.html wealth-excerpt.pdf --pdf-default-font-size=48

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Sorry, command:

  ebook-convert wealth-excerpt.html wealth-excerpt.pdf --pdf-default-font-size=48 --pdf-hyphenate

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Yes, this is a limitation of WebEngine, it has no support for
hyphenation. I suggest using the calibre hyphenation plugin to
pre-hyphenate the book before conversion. At some point I might use
hyphenate.js to hack in hyphenation, but until then, this is a wontfix.

 status wontfix

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

If --pdf-hyphenate doesn't hyphenate PDFs, then it would help users to find a comment to this effect in the documentation: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html#cmdoption-ebook-convert-pdf-output-pdf-hyphenate

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Is it possible to use plugins with ebook-convert, or only through the calibre GUI?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Depends on the plugin, some implement command line interfaces, some do
not.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every alternate Friday.

 status fixreleased

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Using CALIBRE_DEVELOP_FROM, I updated to git HEAD and tried to run this, but I'm getting a Python error that ends with this line:

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: u'/home/jimbo/checkout/calibre/resources/hyphenation/locales.json'

Looking on github, there does not appear to be a 'hyphenation' directory under the 'resources' dir at all: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/tree/master/resources

Are there special steps necessary to acquire the locales.json file?

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Update: I installed v. 4.5 just now, and that works without CALIBRE_DEVELOP_FROM, so the hyphenate/locales.json must be included in the build process.

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Sorry, by 'works' I mean that it's able to run to completion without error, but I'm not seeing any hyphenated words when converting the HTML I attached above.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

You need to wait for the next reease or build calibre from source.
CALIBRE_DEVELOP_FROM will not work for this, since it requires native
code changes.

[Eli Schwartz (eschwartz)]

The feature was implemented in git master, after the 4.5 release, and it
requires a shared library, a new C module extension in calibre's
codebase, various python changes, and new content in the resources/
directory which is not checked into git (because it vendors a collection
of hyphenation dictionaries and creates a json file describing them).

You cannot obtain the feature using CALIBRE_DEVELOP_FROM, because that
method only works to obtain python-only updates.

Instructions for building from source are in
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/INSTALL.rst

But you are on your own in carrying this out -- I'm not sure how to do
any of that on debian-based distributions. You'll probably have to
install various header packages, for example.

Users of the Arch Linux distribution could use my calibre-git build
recipe to trivially build calibre from source, using the latest git version.

Or you could wait for 4.6.0 to be released with the required binary changes.

[jimbojw (jimbojw)]

Thanks for clarifying. I will wait for the 4.6 release to use this feature. 👍