Plugboard, template, and custom composite column recipes

[ACGAuthor]

LOL okay, We're juggling enough issues that I've turned myself around. I'm going to make the paragraphs shorter because right now my brain is not interpreting large chunks of text properly lol.

ISSUE #1
The problem, first, was that it was hyphenating anything longer than 8 letters (ex. "The SeriesTitle" would have been "Seri-itle", which I just don't care for. Frankly, I would be perfect okay getting rid of the hyphenation feature all together and leaving one-word titles completely intact

Since I don't know how to get rid of that feature, however, I worked around it instead. I fixed it by making the change to the second column the way I mentioned above (changed "4,-,4" to "6,-,6.")

So. That worked. I just needed to update it on the device, and I was asking if there was a way to do that and you said deleting the file and re-sideloading it was the only way, which is fine. We're cool there.

What ISN'T working for me, however, is that books I add later in the same series aren't getting the series tacked onto the front of the titles at all.

So, "SeriesTitle [01]" and "SeriesTitle [02]" which were already in my library when I started using the plugboard worked fine, BUT when I added a book that should have gotten "SeriesTitle [03]" tacked onto the title a few days later, no joy.

In other words, in that scenario, the plugboard works fine, but it's not being applied to books added to my library after that initial batch worked. And I have no idea why.

ISSUE #2
In the following two scenarios, I would just like to tweak a couple things cosmetically.

What I have now:
A book in the series "Series & Series" displays as
"S& S [01] BookTitle"

I would like to get rid of that space after the ampersand, so that it displays as
"S&S [01] BookTitle"

The second scenario is when the series title is "Series and Series" which will display as
"SS [01] BookTitle"

What I would like to do is, instead of getting rid of the word and, replace it with an ampersand, so it would display as
"S&S [01] BookTitle"

ISSUE #3
Regarding creating a user category (for exporting as a collection):

The custom column you told me to build above is perfect for sorting authors into chunks of the alphabet . Thank you so much!

Now I just need to figure out how to sort them within a specific genre, which would either be added as a tag, or as another new column, "Urban Fantasy", "Romance", etc.

Would it be possible to do a series of custom columns to make that happen?

For Example, A custom column with the last initial, and then a custom column with the last initial if it has a tag for a specific genre?

Then I would take that custom column and create a user category based upon it, which I'd then use Kindle Collections to export to a collection on my device and I'd be golden.

[library addict]

I hope this is the right thread to ask this in.

I have a simple plugboard for my Kobo mini
{series}{series_index:0>2s| - | - }{title} as destination field title

And it works really well, except with one series where I have a lot of books that are in-betweeners (2.1,3.5, 6.01, etc). There are actual novellas and also deleted scenes and snippets the author posts on her website so there isn't the same number of in-between stories between each novel.

The series displays on my Kobo as:
series name - 01 - title
series name - 02 - title
series name - 03 - title
series name - 04 - title
series name - 05 - title
series name - 06 - title
series name - 07 - title
series name - 08 - title
series name - 09 - title
series name - 10 - title
series name - 10.01 - title
series name - 10.10 - title
series name - 11 - title
series name - 11.10 - title
series name - 11.20 - title
series name - 12 - title
series name - 12.01 - title
series name - 12.10 - title
series name - 2.10 - title
series name - 3.01 - title
series name - 3.50 - title
series name - 3.51 - title
series name - 5.50 - title
series name - 8.50 - title

Is there a way to get the single digit point entries (in red above) to appear in the correct order (add the one leading 0) without making every book in a series include a ".xx" on the end.

I hope that makes sense. I really don't want to change the plugboard to the example {series_index:0>5.2f} as I don't need books by other authors to show as 01.00, 02.00 (with the .xx) It's really just this one author's books I am having an issue with.

[BeeTee-Ess]

I have the following plugboard (copied from Scott Neilsen's example in post #1) set in my Metadata Plugboards:

{series:|| }{series_index:0>2s|[|] - }{title}

I'd like to have the titles of the existing books in my Calibre library show as, for example:

Asimov's Robot [1] - I, Robot
Asimov's Robot [2] - The Caves of Steel
etc.

What must I do to achieve this?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by BeeTee-Ess

I have the following plugboard (copied from Scott Neilsen's example in post #1) set in my Metadata Plugboards:

{series:|| }{series_index:0>2s|[|] - }{title}

I'd like to have the titles of the existing books in my Calibre library show as, for example:

Asimov's Robot [1] - I, Robot
Asimov's Robot [2] - The Caves of Steel
etc.

What must I do to achieve this?

Just send it to your device, it will be set when you do so.

[BeeTee-Ess]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Just send it to your device, it will be set when you do so.

Thanks @eschwartz.

I followed your advice, and sent a 'series' book to my KPW2, and sure enough, it shows there in the format I expected, with the series details at the start of the title.

However, in Calibre, it still just shows as the title alone. I'd like to be able to process my Calibre library, in some way to have the series details prefixed to all of my book titles where appropriate. Is this possible?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by ACGAuthor

LOL okay, We're juggling enough issues that I've turned myself around. I'm going to make the paragraphs shorter because right now my brain is not interpreting large chunks of text properly lol.

ISSUE #1
The problem, first, was that it was hyphenating anything longer than 8 letters (ex. "The SeriesTitle" would have been "Seri-itle", which I just don't care for. Frankly, I would be perfect okay getting rid of the hyphenation feature all together and leaving one-word titles completely intact

Since I don't know how to get rid of that feature, however, I worked around it instead. I fixed it by making the change to the second column the way I mentioned above (changed "4,-,4" to "6,-,6.")

So. That worked. I just needed to update it on the device, and I was asking if there was a way to do that and you said deleting the file and re-sideloading it was the only way, which is fine. We're cool there.

What ISN'T working for me, however, is that books I add later in the same series aren't getting the series tacked onto the front of the titles at all.

So, "SeriesTitle [01]" and "SeriesTitle [02]" which were already in my library when I started using the plugboard worked fine, BUT when I added a book that should have gotten "SeriesTitle [03]" tacked onto the title a few days later, no joy.

In other words, in that scenario, the plugboard works fine, but it's not being applied to books added to my library after that initial batch worked. And I have no idea why.

ISSUE #2
In the following two scenarios, I would just like to tweak a couple things cosmetically.

What I have now:
A book in the series "Series & Series" displays as
"S& S [01] BookTitle"

I would like to get rid of that space after the ampersand, so that it displays as
"S&S [01] BookTitle"

The second scenario is when the series title is "Series and Series" which will display as
"SS [01] BookTitle"

What I would like to do is, instead of getting rid of the word and, replace it with an ampersand, so it would display as
"S&S [01] BookTitle"

ISSUE #3
Regarding creating a user category (for exporting as a collection):

The custom column you told me to build above is perfect for sorting authors into chunks of the alphabet . Thank you so much!

Now I just need to figure out how to sort them within a specific genre, which would either be added as a tag, or as another new column, "Urban Fantasy", "Romance", etc.

Would it be possible to do a series of custom columns to make that happen?

For Example, A custom column with the last initial, and then a custom column with the last initial if it has a tag for a specific genre?

Then I would take that custom column and create a user category based upon it, which I'd then use Kindle Collections to export to a collection on my device and I'd be golden.

Issue #1: This doesn't make any sense to me -- are you sure the plugboard is properly applied? Is it still being applied to the old ones? Double-check by putting the template into a custom column, which books are being affected properly, which aren't?

Issue #2: use this instead for your third column to fix the space after ampersand:

Name: #initials. Template: {#stripped_series:re(([\s])?([^\s])[^\s]+(\s|$),\1)}

Edit all the series' that use "and" to use "&".

Issue #3: what genre tags do you have in mind? I will assume they will be in the "tags" column.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by BeeTee-Ess

Thanks @eschwartz.

I followed your advice, and sent a 'series' book to my KPW2, and sure enough, it shows there in the format I expected, with the series details at the start of the title.

However, in Calibre, it still just shows as the title alone. I'd like to be able to process my Calibre library, in some way to have the series details prefixed to all of my book titles where appropriate. Is this possible?

The whole point is to have it show in the calibre library as title in title field, series in series field, etc. You can always just fill series into the title field and not bother with plugboards, that will show the series in the title, both in calibre and on the device.

You can always sort on series.

[ACGAuthor]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Issue #1: This doesn't make any sense to me -- are you sure the plugboard is properly applied? Is it still being applied to the old ones? Double-check by putting the template into a custom column, which books are being affected properly, which aren't?

It is still being applied to the old books. I even completely removed the books from the device and reloaded them. The books that I initially applied the plugboard to are still correct, but books I have added since aren't.

Checking the template in the custom column...

Okay, it appears to work in when I applied the template to a custom column. Hmm. Wonder why it's not working when sending to the device.

Could it be because I had a custom template in the "sending books to device" settings? I think when I was messing around trying to figure the plugboard and templates thing, I plugged in one of the "Send to Device" templates someone had posted. I don't remember if I put that back to default settings before or after I created the metadata plugboard, or whether or not I got rid of it before or after I loaded the books onto my device last.

Anyway, I wiped the books off the device again earlier because I was doing a bunch of massive changes, and with this new stuff I'm working on, I'm just going to reload the whole library once I've got it figured out. So I guess... maybe it will work this time?

Issue #2: use this instead for your third column to fix the space after ampersand:

Name: #initials. Template: {#stripped_series:re(([\s])?([^\s])[^\s]+(\s|$),\1)}

Edit all the series' that use "and" to use "&".

Woot! Awesome!

Issue #3: what genre tags do you have in mind? I will assume they will be in the "tags" column.

Well, these are the overall collections I have (I have jailbroken my Kindle to use Collections Manager to nest sub-collections within them):

M/F Romance - I have author, series, and sub-genre categories within this and the next one. Not really a large enough collection of this genre to worry about separating them out.

M/M Romance -this is the one I'm most concerned with. I read a lot of it, since it's the genre I publish in.

I use author/series/sub-genre collections for my favorites or the ones I have a large enough collection that it's worth separating it out from the rest. But I also have A LOT of misc singleton authors and books that are hard to wade through.

SFF/UF/PNR (sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal) This is my second largest collection, but again, I don't think I have enough to need to worry about separating them out. That may change someday in the future, but for now I'm okay here.

So, right now, the only genre I really need to break down by alphabetical author groupings is M/M Romance. SFF/UF/PNR is okay for now, but if whatever system I end up using is customizable to allow me to include that later, so much the better.

I am thinking that I might make a Genre column because the tags that can come with a book or that are downloaded when you download the metadata can be a mess.

M/M Romance might be tagged any of the following ways: M/M Romance, MM Romance, gay romance, lgbt romance, M/M, MM, gay, lgbt, MM erotic romance, etc etc etc.

SFF/UF/PNR could be tagged Fantasy, Science Fiction, Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, shifters, vampires, magic, and so on and so forth.

So I could go through and add a tag to the masses in bulk, or I can just add a genre field. Same amount of effort either way, but the Genre field is visually cleaner.

Thanks again so very much!

ETA: I used your code for the third (initials) column and now I have an error that says "TEMPLATE ERROR unmatched group" where the series info used to be in a whole bunch of my books.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by ACGAuthor

It is still being applied to the old books. I even completely removed the books from the device and reloaded them. The books that I initially applied the plugboard to are still correct, but books I have added since aren't.

Checking the template in the custom column...

Okay, it appears to work in when I applied the template to a custom column. Hmm. Wonder why it's not working when sending to the device.

Could it be because I had a custom template in the "sending books to device" settings? I think when I was messing around trying to figure the plugboard and templates thing, I plugged in one of the "Send to Device" templates someone had posted. I don't remember if I put that back to default settings before or after I created the metadata plugboard, or whether or not I got rid of it before or after I loaded the books onto my device last.

Anyway, I wiped the books off the device again earlier because I was doing a bunch of massive changes, and with this new stuff I'm working on, I'm just going to reload the whole library once I've got it figured out. So I guess... maybe it will work this time?



Woot! Awesome!



Well, these are the overall collections I have (I have jailbroken my Kindle to use Collections Manager to nest sub-collections within them):

M/F Romance - I have author, series, and sub-genre categories within this and the next one. Not really a large enough collection of this genre to worry about separating them out.

M/M Romance -this is the one I'm most concerned with. I read a lot of it, since it's the genre I publish in.

I use author/series/sub-genre collections for my favorites or the ones I have a large enough collection that it's worth separating it out from the rest. But I also have A LOT of misc singleton authors and books that are hard to wade through.

SFF/UF/PNR (sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy/paranormal) This is my second largest collection, but again, I don't think I have enough to need to worry about separating them out. That may change someday in the future, but for now I'm okay here.

So, right now, the only genre I really need to break down by alphabetical author groupings is M/M Romance. SFF/UF/PNR is okay for now, but if whatever system I end up using is customizable to allow me to include that later, so much the better.

I am thinking that I might make a Genre column because the tags that can come with a book or that are downloaded when you download the metadata can be a mess.

M/M Romance might be tagged any of the following ways: M/M Romance, MM Romance, gay romance, lgbt romance, M/M, MM, gay, lgbt, MM erotic romance, etc etc etc.

SFF/UF/PNR could be tagged Fantasy, Science Fiction, Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal, shifters, vampires, magic, and so on and so forth.

So I could go through and add a tag to the masses in bulk, or I can just add a genre field. Same amount of effort either way, but the Genre field is visually cleaner.

Thanks again so very much!

If the template is working in the custom column, then try reloading the plugboard. It also may have been only set for certain format/device combos -- to be safe, I always used "any format" "any device".

As far as the genre tagging goes, those are a lot of tags...

We could just test for tags, then if tags are present (I assume each book can only have one tag, for the genre you assigned?) add that into the beginning of the column? I could also scan for each tag individually and then given certain tags, add a main collection name at the beginning. Is one of these options what you are thinking of? Which one would be better?

[BeeTee-Ess]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

The whole point is to have it show in the calibre library as title in title field, series in series field, etc. You can always just fill series into the title field and not bother with plugboards, that will show the series in the title, both in calibre and on the device.

You can always sort on series.

Fair enough. All true.

Thanks again.

[ACGAuthor]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

If the template is working in the custom column, then try reloading the plugboard. It also may have been only set for certain format/device combos -- to be safe, I always used "any format" "any device".

I know I have any format, I think the device is specific to my kindle2. I will change it. How do you reload the plugboard?

As far as the genre tagging goes, those are a lot of tags...

We could just test for tags, then if tags are present (I assume each book can only have one tag, for the genre you assigned?) add that into the beginning of the column? I could also scan for each tag individually and then given certain tags, add a main collection name at the beginning. Is one of these options what you are thinking of? Which one would be better?

I think you're proposing something more sophisticated than I had in mind (probably because I don't know just how sophisticated these functions can get, so I don't get that imaginative, lol.)

My thought was that whenever I load books, I would manually edit the metadata (in bulk, if applicable) to add one set, specific tag (eg: "M/M Romance"). I can do it either in the tags column, or in a "genre" column. I sort of prefer the "genre" option because then it's neater, but if you have a method for making the genre tag the first one in the tags, that could work, too. That way when I sort my tags column, that will be the one sorted by.

Then, having added this genre tag (to the tags or a special genre column) Calibre would search and when it locates a book tagged M/M Romance, it would apply the alphabetical author grouping.

Then I can either create a user category or in Kindle Collections just create collections based on the sorting result for that column.

Clearly I'm not thinking big enough because my assumption of what this thing is capable of is limited by what I imagine I could reasonably make it do. If there is a way to automate things even further, so that the genre tag is generated if the imported books have one or more of the tags commonly used in that genre (I imagine I would have to compile quite a list) and then it proceeds as usual, that would be awesome.

Though, crap, that begs the question of what to do with the authors/series that already have their own collections for whatever reason, because they will be included in the tagging as well.

Unless I make a point of tagging them something like (just an example) "DO NOT SORT" or whatever? Then I can tell Kindle Collections to ignore the books tagged with the "DO NOT SORT" tag.

Also, I used your code for the third (initials) column and now I have an error that says "TEMPLATE ERROR unmatched group" where the series info used to be in a whole bunch of my books.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by library addict

I have a simple plugboard for my Kobo mini
{series}{series_index:0>2s| - | - }{title} as destination field title

And it works really well, except with one series where I have a lot of books that are in-betweeners (2.1,3.5, 6.01, etc). There are actual novellas and also deleted scenes and snippets the author posts on her website so there isn't the same number of in-between stories between each novel.

The series displays on my Kobo as:
series name - 01 - title
series name - 02 - title
series name - 03 - title
series name - 04 - title
series name - 05 - title
series name - 06 - title
series name - 07 - title
series name - 08 - title
series name - 09 - title
series name - 10 - title
series name - 10.01 - title
series name - 10.10 - title
series name - 11 - title
series name - 11.10 - title
series name - 11.20 - title
series name - 12 - title
series name - 12.01 - title
series name - 12.10 - title
series name - 2.10 - title
series name - 3.01 - title
series name - 3.50 - title
series name - 3.51 - title
series name - 5.50 - title
series name - 8.50 - title

Is there a way to get the single digit point entries (in red above) to appear in the correct order (add the one leading 0) without making every book in a series include a ".xx" on the end.

I hope that makes sense. I really don't want to change the plugboard to the example {series_index:0>5.2f} as I don't need books by other authors to show as 01.00, 02.00 (with the .xx) It's really just this one author's books I am having an issue with.

Looking at that, the "3.xx" books should be between the "03" and "04" book. If so, the only thing you can do is to pad the number with a leading zero. That would make them "03.xx". The reason for that is the title sorting on the Kobo devices is as a string. The sorting is not looking at the series index in the title and treating it as a number. It is still treating it as a string.

The real solution to this is to convince Kobo to use the series information that they display for sorting. I wouldn't hold your breath, but hopefully they will do it.

[library addict]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Looking at that, the "3.xx" books should be between the "03" and "04" book. If so, the only thing you can do is to pad the number with a leading zero. That would make them "03.xx". The reason for that is the title sorting on the Kobo devices is as a string. The sorting is not looking at the series index in the title and treating it as a number. It is still treating it as a string.

The real solution to this is to convince Kobo to use the series information that they display for sorting. I wouldn't hold your breath, but hopefully they will do it.

I'm not sure why the 3.xx numbers and other "single" digit ones didn't get the leading 0 added. I guess it's because the {series_index:0>2s| - | - } ignores the decimal point somehow. The plugboard added the leading 0 to the ones without numbers behind the decimal.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by library addict

I'm not sure why the 3.xx numbers and other "single" digit ones didn't get the leading 0 added. I guess it's because the {series_index:0>2s| - | - } ignores the decimal point somehow. The plugboard added the leading 0 to the ones without numbers behind the decimal.

The decimal matches the at-least-two-digits requirement without adding a leading zero, that's why.

[ACGAuthor]

So, after spending a few days fooling around with things, here are places that I've noticed the three-column "General Metadata" plugboard method fails:

1) As already mentioned, any title with an ampersand (&) gets a space after the ampersand when it's reduced down to its initials. (I know eschwartz gave me some code that is supposed to fix this, but as I mentioned in my other posts, it resulted in an error.)

So "Title & Title" would be abbreviated, "T& T" this gets especially absurd when you have a series name like (and this is an honest-to-god series) "Vampires & Mages & Weres, Oh My!" which is them abbreviated to "V& M& WOM"

However, if the title were "Title and Title" it would be abbreviated "TaT" so clearly inserting the space after the ampersand is something that only happens there.

It would be an easy enough fix to just change all series titles to use "and" instead of "&" but sometimes that doesn't happen when you're retrieving the metadata off the web and you have to go through and check everything manually.

Personally I would prefer to see "Title and Title" abbreviated as "T&T" instead of "TaT", however, this would mess with titles using "and" in any other context (off the top of my head I can't come up with another context for it but I'm sure one exists somewhere.)

Actually, this seems to be a recurring problem with any single-letter word, because....

2) If a series title begins with the word "I" (as a personal pronoun referring to oneself" it gets a space after it. So a series titled "I Spy" would be abbreviated "I S" Again, not sure how to fix this without messing with other words containing the letter "i".

3) Titles with an "a" as a single word in the middle get a space after the "a" when being reduced to their initials. Eg: "Measure of a Man" is abbreviated to "Moa M" and "What's a Boy to Do?" would be abbreviated "Wa BtD." As above, with "i", I'm not sure how to fix this without messing up anything containing an "a" as part of a word.

4) If you have a series title like "A to Z" it would be nice to abbreviate it to "A-Z" but again, this would mess the word "to" in any other context (eg: "Brothers to the End" would then be abbreviated "B-tE" which just doesn't work. Not sure what to do about that.)

5) Another interesting way to shorten series titles would be to get rid of extraneous words at the end as well as at the beginning. A (partial, I'm sure) list I came up with would be: Series, Stories, Novels, Books, Trilogy, etc.

For example (for you, eschwartz) if we added "Files" onto that list, the series "The Dresden Files" would be shortened to "Dresden" instead of "DF". So if the series name is "The Home Series" (as in, that is the metadata that downloads, complete with "Series" at the end) it would be shortened to "Home" rather than "HS." "The Impulse Trilogy" would be "Impulse" instead of "IT".

6) This one isn't limited to the 3-step General Metadata method, but it would be great to have a way to format the digits for series so that they stay in sequential order if they have numbers >1 with a decimal place and have 10 or more titles in the series (ie 2.50 happens sequentially after 10, because it isn't formatted as 02.50.)

Also, if there is a series with over 100 titles (I happen to have one; it's not so much of a series as it is a collection of shorts people submitted for an event over on Goodreads, and there are ~190 of them) then you have the following situation:

01, 02 ... 09, 10, 100, 101 ... 109, 11, 110, 111 ... 119, 12, 120, 121 ... and so forth. In this case, there would not need to be any accommodation for decimal places, but for proper sequencing, we would need 001, 002, 003 ... 011, 012, etc.

This is all really nitpicky stuff that probably only matters to the exceptionally anal-retentive, but it's been interesting hunting down these sorts of glitches, and if eschwartz or someone wants to stretch the boundaries of what to do with these plugboards, this could give them something to chew on, so I thought I would share.