Wrong sorting of cyrillic names

[maleficmax]

Hi!
My library is mostly Cyrillic and Calibre almost fails sorting it properly. Here is an example screenshot:

Spoiler:

The names are already in chaotic order

This is Cyrillic alphabet:
А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я

Even rows, which begin with "A" can be separated by another letter.

[kovidgoyal]

Sorting of books by titles is done via the title sort field, which you can access by clicking the edit metadata button.

[chaley]

Macs have a broken implementation on ICU, the library that calibre uses to do international sorting and first letter identification. If you are using a Mac there isn't anything we can do until apple updates their software.

[maleficmax]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Sorting of books by titles is done via the title sort field, which you can access by clicking the edit metadata button.

Emm, sorting by titles works well (surprisingly), but sorting by the author is not.

If you are using a Mac

No, i do not. I am using Linux.

------
Oh my God, i've just understood the problem!
Calibre sorts by the author's second name (surname? the last word in the name string), but in the list it shows the first name first!

Is it possible to change the output order in the list?

Spoiler:

[eschwartz]

If you right-click on any author in the Book Details pane, there is an option to "Manage %s" -- use that to go to Manage Authors, and one of the tools there lets you "Recalculate all author sort values".

All "author" values of "FN LN" should be copied over as "LN, FN" to "author_sort".

I don't know if there are different rules for calibre calculating the sort value on non-English words, but this works great for English books where the metadata is imported wrongly (stupid publishers/vendors use FN LN for both author and author_sort).

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by maleficmax

Oh my God, i've just understood the problem!
Calibre sorts by the author's second name (surname? the last word in the name string), but in the list it shows the first name first!

Is it possible to change the output order in the list?

Calibre is sorting by the author_sort field which is the default.

Under Preferences->Advanced->tweaks you can tweak the rule for deriving author_sort from author. The default rule assumes that author is stored as firstname lastname, and author-sort is derived as lastname, firstname.

[theducks]

There are 2 tweaks (Preferences:tweaks) that may also affect sorting

Language to use when sorting. the default is use the system laocale

Author sort copy method.
You may need to create a set of entries specific to your Locale as the ones supplied are English

Per_language_sort_articles


Enter the word 'sort' in tweaks search box and review all topics that shows. You may see something we missed

[Sabardeyn]

Be aware that you cannot get calibre to use author_sort = LN, FN to display author names in LN, FN order within the book display area. While it will sort the names correctly, it will not swap the order in which the names are displayed.

So...
authors=Abe Johnson
author_sort=Johnson, Abe

What is displayed?
Abe Johnson

Where is it placed within the sort?
Under J

How do you get calibre to display Johnson, Abe?
You don't. Unless you're willing to create a custom column, with custom programming, which computes the necessary changes and displays the list accordingly. But as I understand things you're going to take a pretty big hit in response time in order to do so (with CPU speed & memory capacity, along with number of books in the database, being the main bottlenecks).

[itimpi]

You can always set author to be identical to author_sort if that is what you want and set them both up in lastname, firstname format.

The big problem it is not the default used by most of the metadata sources which makes using author in last name, first name format inconvenient.

[Sabardeyn]

Itimpi,
Wasn't there something else your suggestion alters in how calibre functions? Sorry, this is vaguely familiar to me and I recall that there was some change that I found unacceptable - but I can't remember what the change was. Calibre's internal file structure, maybe?