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capink · 11-22-2021, 04:13 AM

For people familiar with the Action Chains plugin, this is a similar plugin for the calibre editor. It allows the user to chain multiple actions and run them together.

Currently Available Actions:

Plugin Actions
1. Tag Actions: Allows the user to apply a variety of actions on tags, which are located based on range of tag criteria configured by the user. See here for more on this action can do.
2. Style Actions: For more on this action including sample chains, see here.
3. Search and replace: This action is based on calibre editor's search and replace. I included this mainly to be able to do search and replace on multiple books, leveraging the editor's function replace mode. More on this on the section on how to integrate the plugin with the action chains plugin.
4. Mark cursor tag: Using this action you can mark tags, so that you can later apply batch operations on them using the Tag Actions. The way to do this, is the to make a chain containing the mark action and bind it to a keyboard shortcut. After that you can mark the tags by simply clicking on the shortcut when the cursor inside the tag.
  An example for using this can be found in this post.
5. Add Templates: Add templates (css, images ... etc) to the ebook from predefined locations.
6. Remove Files
7. Remove Unused Images
8. Flatten TOC
9. Inline Styles To CSS: You can read more about this action here.
10. Expand Styles
11. Run command: Run a command of files inside the book.
Calibre editor builtin actions
1. Create TOC.
2. Insert Inline TOC.
3. MultiSplit.
4. Transform Styles.
5. Transform HTML.
6. Embed Fonts.
7. Subset Fonts.
8. Remove Unused CSS.
9. Update Book Internals.
10. Smarten Punctuation.
11. Fix HTML.
12. Beautify All.
13. Compress Images.
14. Arrange Into Folders.

How to use the plugin:

To make a new chain follow these steps:

From the drop-down menu choose the "Add/Modify chains" entry to open the config dialog.
In the config dialog press the add button to add a new empty chain.
Double click on the name field to give the new chain a name, and optionally choose a sub-menu and an icon.
To start adding actions to the chain, press the settings button in the chain row, which will open the add actions dialog.
In the add actions dialog, press on the add action button. After this choose and action you want from the actions combo-box. Press the action settings button configure the action.
Repeat for all actions you want to add, and then press OK.

Integration with Action Chains:
First, you must have the latest version of both the Editor Chains plugins and the Actions Chains plugin installed.

The combination of the two plugins will allow you to run your editor chains on multiple books in your library. You can do that be choosing to run whatever editor chain you want from Action Chains (which have action called "Run Editor Chain").

See here for more on how to use the Action Chains plugin.

Examples of how to use Tag Actions:
Below you can find links to two chains that you can import (Editor Chains > Add/Modify Chains > Right Click > Import Chain)

The first chain will match a range(s) of adjacent span tags that all share one similar class called "italic". This is an exact match, so it will not apply for spans containing other additional classes (although you can modify to do so if you want). And then, it merges all these spans into one span. You can download it from here.
The second chain goes one step further, by merging any adjacent spans with similar classes without having to specify what the classes are. You can download it from here.

Note: The criteria above makes sure there is no text between the spans that can break their continuity. But it still allows for text containing only white-space. You can refine this to include whatever punctuation characters you want, by modifying the regular expression in the text filters.

Running the plugin from the command line
You can run the plugin from the command line as follows:

Code:

calibre-debug -r "Editor Chains" chain_name input_file output_file

Note that before running the chain, it will be validated to make sure all member actions can be run from the command line. Currently, all actions in the plugin can run from the command line. Sometimes, However, a certain setting will make an action unavailable for the command line. e.g "Search and replace" with a setting to search "selected files", will not run from the command line (or from Action Chains plugin), because the setting needs the editor GUI to be open with files selected.

Note on Module Editor:

Similar to Action Chains plugin, this plugin provides a module editor for people who want to write their own actions. For information on how to write your own actions, see the comments in calibre_plugins.editor_chains.actions.base

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