The E-book viewer

calibre includes a built-in E-book viewer that can view all the major e-book formats. The E-book viewer is highly customizable and has many advanced features.

Starting the E-book viewer

You can view any of the books in your calibre library by selecting the book and pressing the View button. This will open up the book in the E-book viewer. You can also launch the E-book viewer by itself from the Start menu in Windows. On macOS, you can pin it to the dock and launch it from there. On Linux you can use its launcher in the desktop menus or run the command ebook-viewer.

Highlighting text

When you select text in the viewer, a little popup bar appears next to the selection. You can click the highlight button in that bar to create a highlight. You can add notes and change the color of the highlight. On a touch screen, long tap a word to select it and show the popup bar. Once in highlight mode you can change what text is selected, using touch screen friendly selection handles. Drag the handles to the top or bottom margins to scroll while selecting. You can also Shift+click or right click to extend the selection, particularly useful for multi-page selections.

You can use the Highlights button in the viewer controls to show a separate panel with a list of all highlights in the book, sorted by chapter.

You can browse all highlights in your entire calibre library by right clicking the View button and choosing Browse annotations.

Finally, if you use the calibre Content server’s in browser viewer, you can have the viewer sync its annotations with the browser viewer by going to Preferences → Miscellaneous in the viewer preferences and entering the username of the Content server viewer to sync with. Use the special value * to sync with anonymous users.

Czytać na głos

The viewer can read book text aloud. To use it you can simply click the Read aloud button in the viewer controls to start reading book text aloud. The word being currently read is highlighted. Speech is synthesized from the text using your operating system services for text-to-speech. You can change the voice being used by clicking the gear icon in the bar that is displayed while Read aloud is active.

You can also read aloud highlighted passages by adding the Read aloud button to the selection bar in the viewer preferences under Selection behavior.

Informacja

Support for text-to-speech in browsers is very incomplete and bug-ridden so how well Read aloud will work in the in-browser viewer is dependent on how well the underlying browser supports text-to-speech. In particular, highlighting of current word does not work, and changing speed or voice will cause reading to start again from the beginning.

Informacja

On Linux, Read aloud requires Speech Dispatcher to be installed and working.

Informacja

On Windows, not all installed voices may be visible to the SAPI sub-system that is used for text-to-speech. There are instructions to make all voices visible.

Searching the text

The viewer has very powerful search capabilities. Press the Ctrl+F key or access the viewer controls and click search. The simplest form of searching is to just search for whatever text you enter in the text box. The different forms of searching are chosen by the search mode box below the search input. Available modes are:

  1. Contains - The simplest default mode. The text entered in the search box is searched for anywhere. All punctuation, accents and spaces are ignored. For example, the search: Pena will match all of the following: penal, pen a, pen.a and Peña. If you select the Case sensitive box then accents, spaces and punctuation are no longer ignored.

  2. Whole words - Searches for whole words. So for example, the search pena will match the word Peña but not the word Penal. As with Contains searches above, accents and punctuation are ignored unless the Case sensitive box is checked.

  3. Nearby words - Searches for whole words that are near each other. So for example, the search calibre cool will match places where the words calibre and cool occur within sixty characters of each other. To change the number of characters add the new number to the end of the list of words. For instance, calibre cool awesome 120 will match places where the three words occur within 120 characters of each other. Note that punctuation and accents are not ignored for these searches.

  4. Regex - Interprets the search text as a regular expression. To learn more about using regular expressions, see the tutorial.

Konfigurowanie wyglądu czytnika

You can change font sizes on the fly by using Font size in the viewer controls or Ctrl++ or Ctrl+- or holding the Ctrl key and using the mouse wheel.

Colors can be changed in the Colors section of the viewer preferences.

You can change the number of pages displayed on the screen as well as page margins in Page layout in the viewer preferences.

You can display custom headers and footers such as time left to read, current chapter title, book position, etc. via the Headers and footers section of the viewer preferences.

More advanced customization can be achieved by the Styles settings. Here you can specify a background image to display under the text and also a stylesheet you can set that will be applied to every book. Using it you can do things like change paragraph styles, text justification, etc. For examples of custom stylesheets used by calibre’s users, see the forums.

Wyszukiwanie w słowniku

You can look up the meaning of words in the current book by double clicking or long tapping the word you want to lookup and then clicking the lookup button that looks like a library.

Kopiowanie tekstu i grafiki

You can select text and images by dragging the content with your mouse and then right clicking and selecting Copy to copy to the clipboard. The copied material can be pasted into another application as plain text and images.

Zooming in on images

You can zoom in to show an image at full size in a separate window by either double clicking or long tapping on it. You can also right click on it and choose View image.

Syncing with a paper edition of the current book

Some e-books, that have corresponding print editions, include metadata that marks the start of each paper page. For such e-books, the viewer allows you to jump to a particular paper edition page via the Go to button in the viewer controls. You can also optionally display the paper page corresponding to the current location in the book’s headers or footers via the viewer settings, by adding Pages from paper edition to either the header or the footer.

Skróty klawiszowe

The viewer has extensive keyboard shortcuts, like the rest of calibre. They can be customised in the viewer Preferences. The default shortcuts are listed below:

Keyboard shortcuts for the calibre E-book viewer

Keyboard shortcut

Działanie

Home, Ctrl+ArrowUp, Ctrl+ArrowLeft

Scroll to the start of the current file in a multi file book

Ctrl+Home

Przewiń do początku książki

Ctrl+End

Przewiń do końca książki

End, Ctrl+ArrowDown, Ctrl+ArrowRight

Scroll to the end of the current file in a multi file book

ArrowUp

Przewijaj do tyłu, płynnie w trybie przepływu i po pełnym ekranie w trybie stronicowania

ArrowDown

Przewijaj do przodu, płynnie w trybie przepływu i przez pełny ekran w trybie stronicowania

ArrowLeft

Przewiń w lewo trochę w trybie przepływu i stronę w trybie stronicowania

ArrowRight

Przewiń w prawo trochę w trybie przepływu i stronę w trybie stronicowania

PageUp, Shift+Spacebar

Przewiń do tyłu o pełne ekrany

PageDown, Spacebar

Przewiń do przodu o pełny ekran

Ctrl+PageUp

Przewiń do poprzedniej sekcji

Ctrl+PageDown

Przewiń do następnej sekcji

Alt+ArrowLeft

Wstecz

Alt+ArrowRight

Powtórz

Ctrl+T

Toggle Table of Contents

Ctrl+S

Czytać na głos

Alt+P

Change settings quickly by creating and switching to profiles

Alt+f

Podążaj za linkami za pomocą klawiatury

Ctrl+C

Kopiuj do schowka

Alt+C

Skopiuj bieżącą lokalizację do schowka

Ctrl+Shift+C

Skopiuj bieżącą lokalizację jako calibre:// URL do schowka

/, Ctrl+f, Cmd+f

Szukaj

F3, Enter

Znajdź następny

Shift+F3, Shift+Enter

Znajdź poprzedni

Ctrl+Plus, Meta+Plus

Zwiększ rozmiar czcionki

Ctrl+Minus, Meta+Minus

Zmniejsz rozmiar czcionki

Ctrl+0

Przywróć domyślny rozmiar czcionki

Ctrl+]

Zwiększ liczbę stron na ekranie

Ctrl+[

Zmniejsz liczbę stron na ekranie

Ctrl+Alt+C

Ustaw liczbę stron na ekranie automatycznie

F11, Ctrl+Shift+F

Przełącz na tryb pełnoekranowy

Ctrl+M

Przełącz tekst między trybem stron a trybem ciągłym

Ctrl+W

Przełącz pasek przewijania

Ctrl+X

Przełącz tryb odniesienia

Ctrl+B

Pokaż/ukryj zakładki

Ctrl+Alt+B

Nowa zakładka

Ctrl+N, Ctrl+E

Pokaż metadane książki

Ctrl+Alt+F5, Ctrl+Alt+R

Załaduj ponownie

Ctrl+Shift+ArrowRight

Zmień bieżący wybór w przód o słowo

Ctrl+Shift+ArrowLeft

Zmień bieżący wybór wstecz o słowo

Shift+ArrowRight

Zmień bieżący wybór do przodu o znak

Shift+ArrowLeft

Zmień bieżący wybór wstecz o znak

Shift+ArrowDown

Zmień bieżący wybór do przodu o linię

Shift+Home

Rozszerz bieżący wybór do początku linii

Shift+End

Rozszerz bieżący wybór do końca wiersza

Ctrl+A

Zaznacz wszystko

Shift+ArrowUp

Zmień bieżący wybór wstecz o linię

Ctrl+Shift+ArrowDown

Zmień bieżący wybór do przodu o akapit

Ctrl+Shift+ArrowUp

Zmień bieżące zaznaczenie wstecz o akapit

Esc, MenuKey

Pokaż elementy sterujące przeglądarki e-booków

Ctrl+Comma, Ctrl+Esc, Meta+Esc, Meta+Comma

Pokaż preferencje przeglądarki e-booków

Ctrl+G, ;, :

Idź do określonej lokalizacji lub pozycji

Ctrl+Spacebar

Przełącz automatyczne przewijanie

Alt+ArrowUp

Szybsze autoprzewijanie

Alt+ArrowDown

Wolniejsze autoprzewijanie

Ctrl+I

Pokaż/Ukryj Inspektora

Ctrl+L

Pokaż/ukryj panel wyszukiwania słów

Ctrl+Q (Cmd+Q on macOS)

Zakończ

Ctrl+P

Drukuj do PDF

Ctrl+F11

Przełącz pasek narzędzi

Ctrl+H

Przełącz panel podświetlenia

Ctrl+D

Edytuj tą książkę

Non re-flowable content

Some books have very wide content that cannot be broken up at page boundaries. For example tables or <pre> tags. In such cases, you should switch the viewer to flow mode by pressing Ctrl+M to read this content. Alternately, you can also add the following CSS to the Styles section of the viewer preferences to force the viewer to break up lines of text in <pre> tags:

code, pre { white-space: pre-wrap }

Designing your book to work well with the calibre E-book viewer

The calibre E-book viewer will set the is-calibre-viewer class on the root element. So you can write CSS rules that apply only for it. Additionally, the viewer will set the following classes on the body element:

body.calibre-viewer-dark-colors

Set when using a dark color scheme

body.calibre-viewer-light-colors

Set when using a light color scheme

body.calibre-viewer-paginated

Set when in paged mode

body.calibre-viewer-scrolling

Set when in flow (non-paginated) mode

body.calibre-footnote-container

Set when displaying a popup footnote

Finally, you can use the calibre color scheme colors via CSS variables. The calibre E-book viewer defines the following variables: --calibre-viewer-background-color, --calibre-viewer-foreground-color and optionally --calibre-viewer-link-color in color themes that define a link color.