[GUI Plugin] Quality Check

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Add a "Fix..." menu moving the Check & fix file sizes and Cleanup OPF folders options into.
• Add a "Swap author FN LN <-> LN,FN" menu item for working with selected book(s)
• Change the "Check authors with commas" check so requires only one of a multi-author book to have commas

A couple of these came up from the plugin ideas thread. The main being a feature allowing you to flip between FN LN and LN, FN or vice versa for the selected books (I suggest you assign a keyboard shortcut). So if like me when you add books you find the author is the wrong way around it saves a lot of manual typing. It also works with multiple author names as well, like:
Fred Bloggs & Barney Rubble -> Bloggs, Fred & Rubble, Barney

Note that in determining the surname there is no special logic handling suffixes like Jr etc, there are way too many permutations to be bothered with. But for the overwhleming majority of (english) author names it will suffice.

I was in two minds about adding this feature to this particular plugin, since it works on selected books rather than scanning your library like the various Check... features do. However Since this plugin does have checks already to find author names that do or do not have commas, I think it is not unreasonable to also have the ability to remedy it since such a feature does not exist elsewhere. Besides, it is my plugin and I want the feature.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Add a "Check and rename book paths" menu option to the Fix submenu, for consolidating author paths after commas change made in calibre 0.8.35.
• Fix icons broken from 1.7.1 change on new Fix menu

Calibre 0.8.35 made a change to the physical filenames for author and book files within your library. However no attempt was made to make this change backwards compatible, so users who have added books for the same authors since then can end up with a mish-mash of LN_ FN and LN, FN directories. It doesn't cause any technical issues, but if you have OCD tendencies, want to simplify incremental backups or whatever then you might like them to all be consolidated into the new naming approach.

This new option on the Fix menu scans your books for any that should contain commas in the filename.

Note this menu item should only ever need to be run once on your library, since as mentioned above any books added since 0.8.35 will have the new naming convention applied.

[samy2]

Thanks for this great plugin, by the way

I'd like to have an option to show Ebooks which missing some meta data like language or tags...

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by samy2

I'd like to have an option to show Ebooks which missing some meta data like language or tags...

You don't really need a plugin to find books with missing metadata. For instance, if you want to find books with no Tags just sort the Calibre library window using the Tags column (click on the Tags col hdg). All the 'empty' Tags will be sorted to the top (or the bottom). The Language column would work the same.

Or, probably a better option, enter tags:false or languages:false in the searchbar

[transmitthis]

I just arrived here to find the same thing.
Wanted to find all books with no comments
Although as you say Jackie, it's simple to type **:false - I really don't hang on to that kind of info in my brain
When presented with an empty field and need to try and remember what :,\.;/@ none alphanumeric characters I used 6months ago, well it just is not going to happen.

Like Samy, it would be nice to have the option in a simple dropdown, esp for none python users and ordinary people.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by transmitthis

I just arrived here to find the same thing.
Wanted to find all books with no comments
Although as you say Jackie, it's simple to type **:false - I really don't hang on to that kind of info in my brain
When presented with an empty field and need to try and remember what :,\.;/@ none alphanumeric characters I used 6months ago, well it just is not going to happen.

Like Samy, it would be nice to have the option in a simple dropdown, esp for none python users and ordinary people.

Python? There is no stinkn' Python.

That is a search box with a search term (global or specific field)

fieldname: condition/value

(global) condition/value


empty field values are (mostly) treated as a false condition

the help page has the more tricky range conditionals like dayago

Collect and print cheat sheets (I keep mine in a thin binder) for the things you use. eg. (pcre) REGEX, CSS, Xhtml, Calibre Tag expressions...

[kiwidude]

I can sympathise with both sides of this - theducks is quite right in saying that of all the bits of geek that exist in calibre the search bar is probably one of the simplest.

To be fair it does still have its challenges though with the various permutations of choosing to use or not use quotes & equals signs for instance, tri-state boolean fields (:false/:true vs :yes/:no) or getting funky with regular expressions. You also have to remember exactly what the field was called (e.g. published or pubdate?), and remember to put the # in front of a custom column name. If you don't use search syntax regularly it is understandable to want to avoid having to learn it at all, which is why the tag browser is such a great feature.

So I'm not overly against trying to help users keep their hands on the mouse with a simple menu item click. I'm just not sure though how useful the menu options would be and what they would consist of? For instance do they only need to represent the negative cases? i.e. no tags, no pubdate, no comments etc. Which fields does it need to offer options for - all of them? And what about custom columns - should the plugin try to create menu items for those too?

Sometimes it is easier just to leave it to the user to type - or keep crib sheets as suggested by theducks

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Sometimes it is easier just to leave it to the user to type - or keep crib sheets as suggested by theducks

I am not afraid of the search bar, but it never occurred to me to search for comments:false because I use the quality check plugin to check for quality. It turns out that I have 44 ebooks with no comments, and now I can fix this egregious oversight on my part. Most are short stories, with no comments available via get metadata.

A quality check plugin should check quality, which includes checks for missing metadata. I take your point that this is an open-ended category, but at a minimum it should include the common metadata items. The look and feel book details preferences page has a list of metadata types that can be displayed. It is a long list and, if this is an issue, perhaps the plugin should only show the ones that are on the book details panel.

[transmitthis]

@kiwidude,
It's not an issue with your awesome plugin, and I'm not sure either how useful it would be, just mention it as I was looking for that option (probably because I saw "check html comments) and thought a more simple comments check would be there somewhere.

The issue is really with calibre user interface and how difficult it is to use for some things, as you elegantly put in your second paragraph.

@Ducks.... yes you can write down all the things you may need, or have links to all the help files, but really if I have to have several of those for every single program on my PC, I wouldn't need any "real" books, as I would have enough reading material to last until the heat death of the Universe :razz:

[theducks]

This Duck learned to use computers before there was MS DOS

Spool, Purge, Cat (not the Meow kind), Awk...
3 different systems at work, 3 rows of books at my desk:

And I was just a USER

No Mice, but at least we had DASD, so no paper tape or Hollerith (IBM) cards to lose or damage.

So this may account for this ducks tolerance of the lack of a all-inclusive menu.

field names to be used in searches, can be easily discovered by hovering over the column title and remember to use the # if you see it at the start of the name

[GeckoFriend]

I have a question about "Find ePub formats that have <address> smart tags which corrupt readability".

Quality Check Plugin Help How to fix says "Edit manually using Tweak ePub or Sigil. Search for the closing tag of </address>".

I can't find any Tweak ePub that seems to apply - what is the name of the tweak?

I did check some of the books in Sigil and so far, more than half did not find any instance of </address> so what causes the check to include those books?

If I do want to edit using Sigil, do I remove both address tags or just the ending one?

[kiwidude]

@GeckoFriend,

If you don't want to use Sigil, then you have to use the Tweak ePub feature of calibre (on the right-click menu for a book in the library), which explodes the contents of the ePub into a temporary folder. You can then use whatever text file or html file editor of your choice to do the find/replace operation.

Address tags are caused (I believe) by someone editing the book in MS Word at some point with "smart tags" turned on. It's a stupid feature which everyone should turn off, because it screws up the resulting ebook text.

As to what you should replace, you will want to get rid of both the opening and closing parts of the tag. Personally I do a find in Sigil for "<address", then manually edit the document to remove the opening and closing tag and restore the sentence to its proper form.

[GeckoFriend]

@kiwidude,

Aah! That's what you mean by tweak. I searched Preferences Tweak minutely, obviously w/o success. Inexperienced users tend to need very specific directions. I have never used the right-click menu but will probably start now that I know it exists.

I figured out why Sigil wasn't finding the tags - my error. I have now used Sigil to remove all of the tags and hopefully didn't mess up any of my books doing so.

Thanks vey much for the quick response and help.

[kiwidude]

GeckoFriend - the only way you can "mess up" your books using Sigil is either if you were to attempt some sort of "replace all" (or you fall victim to one of Sigil's various bugs).

My experience of the <address> tag has been that trying to come up with a generic find/replace regular expression for it is not possible, since it could be at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence, and could sometimes denote the end of the paragraph. So long as you just simply step through the find results and manually edit the document like I mentioned above then you will be perfectly fine.

At the end of the day it is not a life or death change to make to your books - if it scares you then don't do it . However I get annoyed with seeing a sentence broken onto a new line when the reading device happens to hit the <address tag and puts the word in a different font size etc - it just breaks my reading flow which irritates. So if you have OCD tendencies like me, this way you can find & fix them before the book hits your ereader

Anyways, glad you are now sorted.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by GeckoFriend

@kiwidude,

Aah! That's what you mean by tweak. I searched Preferences Tweak minutely, obviously w/o success. Inexperienced users tend to need very specific directions. I have never used the right-click menu but will probably start now that I know it exists.

I figured out why Sigil wasn't finding the tags - my error. I have now used Sigil to remove all of the tags and hopefully didn't mess up any of my books doing so.

Thanks vey much for the quick response and help.

I am going to side with kiwidude.

I would never do a Replace all. Address tags can just appear way to many ways

I use the 'Find', to get to the Next occurance,
Then hand edit to fit the current Context