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GUIDE.md

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Importation

The following tools will be used in the examples: jq, rsync and stest.

First build the importer with cargo build --feature importer --release. (The resulting binary is in ./target/release.)

Then, create an empty database with plato -Z LIBRARY_PATH.

If the command runs successfully, a file named .metadata.json will appear in the given directory.

The initial importation is done with plato -I LIBRARY_PATH. What this does is to search for files in LIBRARY_PATH that aren't referenced by .metadata.json and save the results in .metadata-imported.json.

At this stage the imported metadata contains the following keys:

  • added: the date of importation.
  • file: an object with the following keys:
    • path: the path of the document relative to LIBRARY_PATH.
    • kind: the lowercased file extension.
    • size: the file size in bytes.
  • categories: if the document isn't a direct child of LIBRARY_PATH, then its relative path will be converted into a category.

The next step is to extract ISBN from the documents: plato -S LIBRARY_PATH. (Subsequent commands read and write to .metadata-imported.json.)

This task might fail if:

  • The document doesn't have an OCR text layer.
  • The ISBN isn't given or the ISBN is listed after the first ten pages.
  • The document predates the invention of the ISBN (1970).
  • The ISBN is listed in the first ten pages but the OCR text layer is scrambled.

And then we'll try to retrieve information for each book: plato -R LIBRARY_PATH. This tasks normally uses the ISBN extracted earlier as input for sending a request to a server. But if the ISBN is missing it will use a cleaned up version of the file name as input unless -s is passed.

The final step, cleaning up, is achieved with plato -C LIBRARY_PATH.

I would recommend adding binding to your text editor to open files at the cursor position (using the double quote characters as boundary) so you can quickly fill out missing information in .metadata-imported.json.

Now you can merge the imported metadata:

jq -s '.|add' .metadata.json .metadata-imported.json > metadata.json && mv metadata.json .metadata.json

Connect your e-reader to your computer. If you're importing for the first time, create and empty database: plato -Z EREADER_LIBRARY_PATH. Merge the imported metadata into the e-reader's database.

Synchronize your e-reader library with:

rsync -vurt --delete --modify-window 1 --exclude .metadata.json LIBRARY_PATH/ EREADER_LIBRARY_PATH/`

(Passing --modify-window 1 is mandatory when dealing with FAT32 file systems.)

Don't remove .metadata-imported.json until all your devices are synchronized.

You can check if a database contains broken paths with:

jq -r '.[].file.path' .metadata.json | stest -ave

Configuration

The default library path is /mnt/onboard/books. If your library lives somewhere else, you'll need to create a file named settings.json in the same directory as the program's binary with the following content:

{
	"libraryPath": "EREADER_LIBRARY_PATH"
}

If there's a user.css in same directory as the program's binary, it will be used for all the reflowable formats.