Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

bashnev · 2016-01-18 23:45:56

Some time over the course of January Calibre stopped opening ebooks with the viewers I use (zathura, FBReader). Internal viewers work as expected.

The initial problem was the due to the lack of mime type defaults -- I believe there was a change in the free desktop standards recently. I use i3 so there is no desktop environment variable set and the generic opener within xdg-open was failing. After updating the mime defaults, using mimeo, zathura and FBreader open but without the showing the book.

Using

 calibre-debug -g

and then trying to open a PDF from within Calibre produces an error such as this

error: Unknown file type: 'cannot open `/home/bashnev/documents/mathsci/P.%20R.%20Halmos/Naive%20Set%20Theory%20(2376)/Naive%20Set%20Theory%20-%20P.%20R.%20Halmos.pdf' (No such file or directory)'

To be clear, the file exists and can be opened from the shell with

zathura /home/bashnev/documents/mathsci/P.\ R.\ Halmos/Naive\ Set\ Theory\ \(2376\)/Naive\ Set\ Theory\ -\ P.\ R.\ Halmos.pdf

and from within ranger. So it appears the spaces being written as %20 in the path are the issue. Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

As I said up until recently there was no problem - Calibre and i3 were working together nicely. There are 2 workarounds both of which I would prefer to avoid:

Use the internal viewers
Toggle the option to "set space to underscore" (which I just noticed) which would help with future book additions and then go through the entire existing library and alter the paths

Last edited by bashnev (2016-01-20 13:37:40)

eschwartz · 2016-01-20 04:46:04

calibre just uses QDesktopServices.openUrl(QUrl.fromLocalFile(the_file))
It is all handled under the hood by Qt -- which urlencodes the filename, and passes it to xdg-open.

Try the following:

touch "/tmp/name with space.txt" && XDG_UTILS_DEBUG_LEVEL=2 xdg-open 'file:///tmp/name%20with%20space.txt'

It *should* work (it works for me, as does just using calibre) -- but for you it will apparently fail.

Which (broken) handler are you using on i3? Because the generic handler does work, as does gvfs-open.

Remembering this bug... exo-open used to be broken and prompted the same question, though it should be fixed now.

bashnev · 2016-01-20 13:37:05

Thanks for your help. It turns out that xdg-utils-mimeo was the problem. Installing xdg-utils from extra fixed the problem.

eschwartz · 2016-01-21 00:20:32

Well, I suppose that would do it.

mimeo needs to be fixed.

the commandline that xdg-open passes (as verified by /tmp/xdg-open with judicious use of echo) is

some_opener "file:///tmp/name%20with%20space.txt"

Last edited by eschwartz (2016-01-21 00:35:46)

Xyne · 2016-01-21 03:26:29

Eschwartz wrote:

mimeo needs to be fixed.

done

Arch Linux

#1 2016-01-18 23:45:56

Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

#2 2016-01-20 04:46:04

Re: Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

#3 2016-01-20 13:37:05

Re: Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

#4 2016-01-21 00:20:32

Re: Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

#5 2016-01-21 03:26:29

Re: Calibre failing to open ebooks [SOLVED]

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