[Solved] calibre ebook-viewer not working correctly

Question

In the last few days the ebook-viewer packaged along with calibre has started behaving strangely by inserting gaps or spaces randomly all over books. Calibre itself and the other tools seem to be OK.
EDIT: Screenshots
Calibre's ebook-viewer: http://i.imgur.com/ypGBTlI.png
Calibre's ebook-editor: http://i.imgur.com/WnPjFkx.png (Note - no spaces in the source files or rendering of the page)
After looking around for a bit - I've discovered that the newest version of calibre switched from the regular releases (which on Arch stopped at version 1.40) to beta releases (Arch package version 1.204.1-2).
It seems the official Arch package is now the beta of calibre.
I've tried downgrading to previous version and the newset one that works is the 1.40 version.
I would very much like to have the latest, official version of calibre rather than the old 1.40.
Unfortunately calibre seems like a complex beast.
I suspect the problem is with qt5-webkit (that I guess is what is rendering the book.)
This must be a **new** dependency as I don't have a version installed before August 3rd when calibre was upgraded.
$ grep -i qt5-calibre /var/log/pacman.log
[2014-08-03 11:34] [PACMAN] upgraded calibre (1.40.0-1 -> 1.204.0-1)
$ grep -i qt5-webkit /var/log/pacman.log
[2014-08-03 11:34] [PACMAN] installed qt5-webkit (5.3.1-1)
I don't have an older version - I only have qt5-webkit-5.3.1.
Calibre dependencies
chmlib
icu
imagemagick
libmtp
libusbx (libusb)
libwmf
podofo
pyqt4-common
python2-apsw
python2-chardet
python2-cherrypy
python2-cssselect
python2-cssutils
python2-dateutil
python2-dnspython
python2-html5lib
python2-lxml
python2-mechanize
python2-netifaces
python2-pillow
python2-psutil
python2-pyqt5
python2-six
qt5-svg
qt5-webkit
shared-mime-info
ipython2 (optional) - to use calibre-debug
python2-pycountry (make)
qt5-x11extras (make)
There seems to be a strange mix of qt4 and qt5 here:
pyqt4-common, python2-pyqt5, qt5-svg, qt5-webkit, qt5-x11extras
What I would like is to have the latest version of calibre 1.47 and have it nicely integrated with Arch rather than just install it somewhere in my home directory and maintain it manually.
Unfortunately I'm stumped and I have no idea how to do that.
Is anyone else having problems with the beta calibre and its ebook-viewer?
Can anyone offer some suggestions or help out?
Last edited by bhrgunatha (2014-08-08 06:39:16)

Answer 1

Scimmia wrote:
Calibre 1.xx simply won't build with current versions of pyqt4. The official package had to either stay at 1.40 or jump to the 2.0 betas. The maintainer decided to package the betas.
It's working perfectly here. I wonder if it's simply a font problem.
I've tried changing fonts (both Serfi and Sans Serif) and sizes but it's the same for any font I choose at any size.
Since 1.40 uses pyqt4 and calibre now won't work with that, then perhaps its a problem on my system with the mix of qt4 and qt5.
Maybe I'm missing some vital qt5 library?
$ pacman -Qs qt5
local/attica-qt5 5.0.0-1 (kf5)
local/libdbusmenu-qt5 0.9.3+14.10.20140619-1
local/phonon-qt5 4.7.2-1
local/phonon-qt5-gstreamer 4.7.2-1
local/polkit-qt5 0.112-1
local/pyqt5-common 5.3.1-1
local/python2-pyqt5 5.3.1-1
local/qt5-base 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-declarative 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-location 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-quickcontrols 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-script 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-sensors 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-svg 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-webkit 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-x11extras 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
local/qt5-xmlpatterns 5.3.1-1 (qt qt5)
Last edited by bhrgunatha (2014-08-07 02:41:28)