“Saving to disk” – How to save books with a shorter title length in filename?

[ToBiku]

Hello,

I intend to save my books from Caibre library to a disk and I’m using the function “Save to disk”. Sometimes the result is a very long EPUB filename, mainly due to the title length of some books, e.g.:

“The Language of Emotional Intelligence: The Five Essential Tools for Building Powerful and Effective Relationships”

I’m looking for a automatic way to save book title with a shorter length.

I looked in “Calibre User Manual” but the only thing I found was only how to limit the length by predefining a fix length, an this do not answer to my needs… I also search in this forum without success… (just in case I miss it, can you please inform me the post? Thanks !)



[Request]

Can someone can help me with the regular expressions I must use in field {title} to ignore punctuation mark ":" and after from title metadata:

From:
“The Language of Emotional Intelligence: The Five Essential Tools for Building Powerful and Effective Relationships”

To:
“The Language of Emotional Intelligence”

Thanks in advance,
ToBiKu

[theducks]

I created a SubTitle field (Text: Shown in Tag Browser) and Cut and pasted (manual), leaving the Title
Not Automatic is not fool proof. There are titles WITH Colons

[BetterRed]

Lookup name: strapline
Column heading: Strapline
Column type: Long text, like comments, not shown in the Tag browser
Column heading: Show heading to the side of the text
Interpret this column as: Short text, like a title

BR

[davidfor]

@ToBiku: You could use the following to get just whatever is in the title before the colon:

{title:sublist(0,1,:)}

But, I tend to agree with the others. Looking at my library, anything with a colon in the title would be meaningless without what is after the colon. Or a duplicate title.

It also depends on why you are doing this. If your library has a lot of books like your example, where what is after the colon is more of a subtitle, then I would split it.

If the problem is that the file name length, you can look at the template function "shorten". With this you have a bit of control over how the title is shortened to fit. I think calibre is using this on the file names if the full path is going to exceed 254 characters (I think it's 254).

[ToBiku]

[SOLVED]


Thanks theducks, BetterRed and davidfor for your replies.

@davidfor, you saved my day! Your proposed code answer to my needs.
@theducks, @BetterRed, your proposals are good ones, but I want to avoid manual data entering.

I’m reading mainly non-fictional business books - a lot of them have a subtitle, and sometimes more than one author. Some examples:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science
The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition
The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

And so on…

When applying a Save to disk “{title} ({pubdate}, {publisher}) {authors}” get a little bit of a mess for my taste…

Maybe as a possible functionality, we may consider:
a) a standard subtitle field in “Basic metadata”
b) the “Title sort” will ignore the subtitle
… just some ideas

ToBiKu