Calibre 9.12 has been released as the latest update to the popular open-source e-book management software. A particularly noticeable addition is the new feature available to macOS users, enabling them to share books via AirDrop directly from the Calibre Connect/Share button.
The Content Server now also supports plugins that are able to add new endpoints to the server backend, and the update has improved its OPDS support by including kind metadata in the feed links.
The book editor offers an option in its image compression tool to convert GIFs to JPEG or WebP, which can help reduce file sizes in books where animation is not needed. Additionally, a typo that had caused the previous PNG-to-JPEG conversion function to fail has been fixed.
Moreover, the editor responsible for the Table of Contents has now added a special button to sort entries, and the driver for the Kobo is now compatible with the latest version of the Tolino firmware.
The update also resolves a problem in the e-book reader where the width of the reading area would unexpectedly change when lengthy section titles were displayed in the headers or footers. Nowadays, Calibre deals with titles that don’t fit within the available space without affecting the layout of the main text.
Regarding the Windows command-line experience, when books are added via calibre.exe with the –-with-library option, Calibre will switch to the selected library before importing the files, instead of ignoring the requested library.
Further corrections address recursive template evaluation, which now properly inherits the Python template policy, and custom tag-like columns, which can once again accept more than about 30,000 characters.
Users who have a high-resolution display might notice that menu separators now appear correctly on those systems where they had been missing before. The Content Server also prevents an unstyled flash when switching from author view to series view in dark mode.
For Linux users the official binaries now preload libxml2 in order to make sure that the desired version of the library is used even if Qt WebEngine checks the system and tries to load a different copy.
For additional details, see the announcement. Calibre 9.12 is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
