Stop Calibre from changing Titles

[GullyOak]

My main use for Calibre is to convert personal .rtf files so that I can read them on my Kindle.

I have hundreds rtf files and they all use space-hyphen-space sequences and commas in their filenames. There is no author name or series name or anything else embedded in the .rtf filename: nothing except the full title. I'd like to instruct Calibre to keep the full filename as the full title--hyphens and spaces and all--without making any changes to it whatsoever (other than stripping away the ".rtf" file type).

Is there a simple way to do that? (Renaming my files is not an option: my filenames interact with other programs.)

[Mikou]

I tested it this out and I believe this would work for you:
1. In Calibre, open Preferences
2. In Preferences, choose Adding Books (in the Import/export section)
3. In Adding Books, uncheck "Read metadata from file contents rather than file name"
4. In the "Configure metadata from filename box", there is a drop down menu under Regular expression. Choose (?P<title>.+)
5. Click Apply, close Preferences and you are done.

Note: if you want to test it out before saving the change, use the Test box where you type in a sample of a file name (e.g. Melville, Herman - Moby Dick.rtf). When you click test, you will see how Calibre would process the filename. After the change, there is an option to restore the default settings, if you need to do so.

Good luck!

[GullyOak]

Originally Posted by Mikou

Good luck!

Mikou: Wow--thank you!

I looked all through preferences and settings, and couldn't make heads or tails of what I read. I thought there must be an easy solution and that an expert with Calibre could solve my problem in a moment--which you have!

So thank you!

[gbm]

Originally Posted by GullyOak

Mikou: Wow--thank you!

I looked all through preferences and settings, and couldn't make heads or tails of what I read. I thought there must be an easy solution and that an expert with Calibre could solve my problem in a moment--which you have!

So thank you!

From the calibre user manual:

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gui.html#add-books

The Add books action can read metadata from a wide variety of e-book formats. In addition, it tries to guess metadata from the filename. See the Guessing metadata from file names section, to learn how to configure this.

bernie

[Mikou]

Originally Posted by GullyOak

Mikou: Wow--thank you!

I looked all through preferences and settings, and couldn't make heads or tails of what I read. I thought there must be an easy solution and that an expert with Calibre could solve my problem in a moment--which you have!

So thank you!

You're welcome. Glad I could help.

[GullyOak]

Thank you, also, gbm.

Another change I made was to stop Calibre from appending "- Unknown" to the end of all my filenames (e.g., "the author"):

Go to Preferences, "Sending books to devices":
Change "save template" to {author_sort}/{title}
(You can also get rid of {author sort}/ if you don't mind everything being put into the same directory.)

[irmar]

This doesn't work for me.
The way I like filenames is Author - Title.
So, instead of the standard expression for extracting metadata which is
(?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)
I put:
(?P<author>[^_]+) - (?P<title>.+)

As a test, I put "Homer - The Iliad.epub"
and Calibre said that
Title: The
Authors: Homer

then I tried "Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer.epub"
and Calibre again interpreted it as the title being "Tom"
So it seems that it doesn't recognize more than one word as the title.