Problems with the Annotations Browser

[Torsten Pätzold]

Hello everyone,

In both Calibre 7 and 8, the Annotations Browser is not finding all of my highlights and notes. I've highlighted and commented on text in numerous e-books using the e-book viewer. All searches are found within the e-book viewer, but not in the Annotations Browser.

All books with highlights/comments are listed in the Annotations Browser. I've tested several searches. Certain keywords or text passages are found in some books, but not in others. I'm using Calibre version 8 on Linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Is this a bug?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The annotations browser will only show annotations made for books in
your calibre library. If you annotate a book file that is not in your
calibre library, it wont show up. If you find annotations from books in
your calibre library not showing up then attach a sample such annotated
book and I will see if I can reproduce.

[Torsten Pätzold (literat)]

Thank you for the quick reply.

I'm only referring to highlights/annotations in e-books that I made in the Calibre e-book viewer.

Here's an example:

Example 1 shows the text in the e-book.
Example 2 shows the book in the annotation browser.
Example 3 shows the search for the keyword "aphorism."
The example book ("Reading is thinking with someone else's brain") doesn't appear.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

The calibre ebook viewer can be run standalone to view books not inside
calibre as well. I was asking if that is what you are doing.

[Torsten Pätzold (literat)]

No, all books are integrated into Calibre.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

OK I will see if i can replicate your issue when I have a moment.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Does not replicate for me. Steps I tried:

1) View an EPUB file in calibre
2) Create some annotations, with some text
3) Close the viewer
4) Open the annotations browser
5) Check that all the newly created annotations are present
6) Close the annotations browser
7) Repeat several times

Try running calibre from a terminal and then replicate the issue and see
if any errors are printed to the terminal.

The only condition where annotations can fail to be updated in the
calibre library is if calibre locks the database for over 10 seconds at
a time, which is highly unlikely. It's on my TODO list to fix even this
possible failure mode by using IPC, but I haven't got around to it yet.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

And I had a little time so I implemented the IPC annotations update so
even that loophole is now closed.

[Torsten Pätzold (literat)]

Yes, e-books with annotations are added to the Annotations Browser. This works for me, too. The bug: When I search for individual words in the browser, not all possible results are displayed. Some books don't appear in the results, even though the searched word is there.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

yes, I know, I cannot replicate that however. All books with the word
show up when I search in the annotations browser.

[Torsten Pätzold (literat)]

If I run "Library Maintenance | Restore Database", all search results are found again.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Do you have the calibre library on some kind of networked or non-native
filesystem?

[Torsten Pätzold (literat)]

I have the Calibre library on my computer's drive without an network.