Introduction

Calibre is an very popular ebook management system, written in Python, and extensible by python plugins.

FanFicFare is a tool, written in Python, for downloading fanfiction stories from various web sites and generating consistent ebooks from them.

Bringing the two together with a Calibre plugin was a natural extension of FanFicFare.

Details

Hopefully, the hardest part about using the plugin will be getting it setup and on your toolbar.

1. First, obviously, you need to have Calibre installed and setup.

2. You will need to download the plugin. The latest version is available inside Calibre. Go to Preferences, Get Plugins, pick FanFicFare, Install.

3. You will then be asked which toolbars/menus you would like the plugin to appear. I suggest adding it to your main toolbar.

4. Restart Calibre after installing a plugin.

5. If the FanFicFare button doesn't appear, you may need to go to Preferences->Toolbar and add it.

If you have the earlier FanFictionDownLoader (AKA FFDL) plugin installed, FanFicFare will copy your existing FFDL settings into FanFicFare. You can uninstall FanFictionDownLoader--FanFicFare is the newer version and has all the same features and functionality.

The official Calibre Introduction to plugins is here.

The official distribution point for the plugin is the FanFicFare plugin forum on mobileread.com.

Once installed, the plugin should be very simple to use.

Click the FanFicFare button. A dialog will open prompting you for URL(s) to download. As a convenience, the contents of the clipboard will already be copied in.

If you already have books selected, FanFicFare will instead offer to update them. There is a configuration option 'Default to Update when books selected' you can uncheck to make it always give the add URL dialog.

You can then choose your preferred format, what you want to happen if you already have a copy of that story, and whether the story metadata (title, author, tags, etc) should be updated if it's not a new story.

The Configuration for this plugin lets you save your defaults for the options above, plus save a personal.ini equivalent. Perhaps most usefully, the personal.ini section lets you declare you are always 'an adult' and save usernames and passwords for those sites that require them.

If you have any problems or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Our FanFicFare plugin forum is the most active forum for discussion of the plugin version.

Mac User Crashes

Some Mac users have had problems with FanFicFare plugin crashing calibre entirely. This has been extremely difficult to fix because it only happens for some Mac users.

To work around it, if you are a Mac user, and the FanFicFare plugin causes calibre to crash for you, you can create a specially named file that FanFicFare plugin will look for as a flag to disable certain code that seems to cause the crashes.

First, you need to open the Calibre plugin folder.

The Calibre plugin folder is at ~/Library/Preferences/calibre/plugins where ‘~’ is the user’s home folder, which is generally (though not always) called their username, and located at Primary Hard Drive/Users/

Note that in OS X 10.7 and up, users’ Library folders (as distinct from the system Library folder) are hidden. One can get there in Finder by clicking Go > Go to Folder… in the menu bar and entering ~/Library/Preferences/calibre/plugins in the dialogue box. The default keyboard shortcut for Go to Folder is Command + Shift + G (thanks to seabream for the Mac instructions)

Once there, create a file named fanfictiondownloader_macmenuhack.txt.

Restart calibre.

This will disable the menu and keyboard shortcuts for FanFicFare plugin configuration and 'about'. You can still configure it by drilling down via calibre's preferences > plugins > UI Plugins, search for FanFicFare.