06-03-2010, 04:11 PM | #1 |
Digitally confused
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Learner questions
I'm getting more into Calibre and the more impressed I'm becoming but I have a few questions:
Some of my books are in the format "author name - series name - book title.type" and this causes issues. Is there anyway to get Calibre to understand this type of format or should I rename these files? Some books ended up with the title and author swapped over - is there a way to swap them back without editing the data manually? If I add meta info and covers to a whole folder of books I might get problems with 10% (still pretty good though). Is there an option to see which ebooks don't have covers yet? |
06-03-2010, 04:25 PM | #2 | |||
Wizard
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Last edited by Starson17; 06-03-2010 at 04:27 PM. |
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06-03-2010, 06:47 PM | #3 | |
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Most file names are like this:
Arthur C Clarke - Patent Pending.txt But a small percentage might be like this:Arthur C Clarke - Rama 01 - Rendezvous With Rama.lit I found the regular expression it currently has (?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+) but I couldn't see how you could suggest multiple expressions ie one expression for the first type of file name and another for the other type of file name. I'm familiar with traditional regexp but these are different - I assume the <title> refers to an internal variable for the title but the ?P etc seemed odd.Quote:
PS I'm using the save option to save things but I have no real idea what I'm saving - is it the new meta data I'm creating? |
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06-03-2010, 07:38 PM | #4 | ||||
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Quote:
Code:
^((?P<author>([^\_0-9]+)(?=\s*-\s*)(?!\s*-\s*[0-9.]+)|\b))(\s*-\s*)?((?P<series>[^0-9\-]+) ([-#] ?)?(?P<series_index>[0-9.]+)?\s*-\s*)?(?P<title>.+) Quote:
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06-04-2010, 10:57 AM | #5 |
Digitally confused
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All the above worked well but I still notice a few odd things though:
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06-04-2010, 12:59 PM | #6 |
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The point is that the file extension should not be on the Title. Then Calibre would store both formats in the same folder under a single entry in Calibre.
The easiest thing tends to be to correct one of them to the correct value and then use the Calibre Merge facility to combine them under a single book entry. |
06-04-2010, 01:51 PM | #7 | ||||||
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Last edited by Starson17; 06-04-2010 at 01:56 PM. |
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06-04-2010, 03:22 PM | #8 |
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Don't get me wrong - I think Calibre is great but it seems to require a hell of a steep learning curve.
For instance seeing the correct author and title in the meta data and being told that an entry couldn't be found - it turned out an apostrophe was missing from the book title. I found the same issue if an author's name had periods after their initials when these weren't in the database. I understand why it's not matching but I can't understand why you can't strip the punctuation before trying to do a match. Sometimes there was text in brackets within the file name this had to be stripped before I could get a match. Often the book title would appear by itself with no author - the books were famous enough to not need any more detail but these books ended up with "Unknown" in the author field and no match in the database. Quite frustrating. At other times the file might be named "book title by author" and it seems like an attempt could be made to spot these type of matches automatically. I mentioned before that sometimes the files had the author and the title mixed up but it should be possible to check this issue automatically as well. I appreciate that this might add a few more milliseconds to a search but it added an age to me setting up my library. If you're just querying a MySQL database then I'd be happy to write a stored proc to do all the above. PS @itimpi - the file extension mentioned was just a file extension and not a part of the name. I came across multiple versions of books all named the same but with different file extensions. The problem was that I need to search for meta data (and book covers) for each individual file which added to the time it took me to build my library. |
06-04-2010, 05:01 PM | #9 | |
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To do this on the Calibre side, it would need to muck with the contents of the author and title before the search request was sent to each data source. That might help in some situations, but you wouldn't be able to see what you were searching for. If I put the correct author in, and Calibre searched for something else, I'd be annoyed. |
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06-04-2010, 06:43 PM | #10 | |
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Or After the fact highlight all of the same books in various formats and use the merge feature to put them all under one "book" and then update the metadata for all formats at once. |
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06-05-2010, 07:25 AM | #11 | ||
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This could be done just for those books which weren't matched using your current method. Alternatively it could be done as the first pass which might mean much faster retrieval of the data. You mentioned entering a library of 14k books so even if only 5% of these books needed manually adjusting this would still mean 700 books need adjusting. Quote:
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06-05-2010, 07:41 AM | #12 | ||
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Don't get me wrong It would be nice to have a wonderful algorithm to properly handle my mistakes or miss-edits. Right now it seems that 10% of effort has gotten us 90% improvement and the next 10% improvement in the fuzzy logic area might take a 90% effort. I'm looking forward to your future ideas and I hope you have skills I don't to jump in and add some effort to the project. |
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06-05-2010, 09:35 AM | #13 | ||||
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Look - I understand why you want more automation in data entry. So did I. That's why I contributed code to the project - to make the initial data entry job easier. It is currently much, much easier. The improvements from 0.6 to the new 0.7 are huge. Quote:
I suspect Calibre will continue to improve, but it will probably never reach the stage of completely automated metadata fetching. Quote:
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06-10-2010, 06:24 AM | #14 |
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You can easily delete books by highlighting them and pressing delete but is there a way to undelete books?
PS Good job on 7.1 |
06-10-2010, 08:30 AM | #15 |
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