Author/Authors sort and appearance in home-file

[chaot]

Hallo.

I wanted to change author/author sort and especially the appearance in the home-file. So far I was very successful (in changing), only the result is not just the one wanted. It's a total mess now. How many times I have changed anything and what, to ask would be quite pointless.

Before (sorted alphabetical→s. a.)
Authors fn ln, s. a. fn (tag browser)
Authors sort ln, fn
home-file fn ln, s. a. fn

Wanted
Authors fn ln, s. a. ln (tag browser)
home-file fn ln, s. a. ln

Consequently, it is probably just best to show you the status quo and to solicit general advice.


Manage Authors

Preferences→Advanced→Tweaks→Author sort name algorithm is set on author_sort_copy_method = 'comma' (default)

I suspect any solution means some manual work, but that does not matter, makes me more and more familiar with my library and calibre.


Calibre main view
Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini and Falk Lüke are authors of multi authors books. Why these 3 books (from that authors couple) are on top, that one from Falk Lüke not in line, I don't know!?


Multi author book

In the example the 4 authors F Brænne, Kari + F. Galouye, Daniel + F. Gifune, Greg + F. Pötzl, Norbert are to change manually, I gess. Calibre doesn't treat 3 or 4 name authors like (normal) 2 name authors. Anyway, that isn't a (big) problem, they are in minority.
I can do that on two ways, with tool Edit metadata individually or Rename [author name].

Results in tag browser OK, but not in home-file.
Authors fn ln, s. a. ln (tag browser)
home-file fn ln, s. a. fn


Kari F Brænne - - - - - - - - - Kari F Brænne_home-file


Daniel F Galouye - - - - - - - Daniel F Galouye_home-file

The writing of Fabio Genovesi and Falko Rademacher is OK, but not the sorting. Of course I can do that as described above (Edit metadata individually or Rename [author's name] - but not for about 9000 books.

And in general (applies to all authors), how do I change the home-file sorting?

[theducks]

(get it if you don't already have) Quality Check PI: Fix: swap author fn<>ln

select only wrong (order) books. The PI has Checks for almost every data type except bogus/just pain wrong

[chaot]

This Quality check PI is really a very powerful, fast-acting tool. Worked perfectly.

Authors sorting in Tag browser now as desired (using Manage Authors).



Problem case home-file. Is there a possibility of the appearance fn ln, listed alphabetically by ln? So the same as in Tag-browser, I would prefer.

Otherwise ln, fn?

[theducks]

Is this a Computer Age generation thing?

I learned when (hard copy) things were file Ln, Fn

In the telephone book, you looked for theducks under D for Ducks and slid down the list until you got to The.

theducks Forms were filed in the D drawer, which was below the C drawer

To me, Ln, Fn makes it easy to locate a name as I ONLY read as many first characters (coarse locate) to establish close, where I now read more (fine locate).
When you display Fn Ln (still sorted on Ln, Fn). I need to read ALL of the Fn and the first letters of the last name.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by theducks

Is this a Computer Age generation thing?

No, it's a library thing, at least that's how I look at it. Books are sorted LN, FN but display the author FN LN.

That's what I'm used to, and what I use in Calibre. But to each his own.

[chaot]

Here I follow the opinion of theducks.
Sometimes someone (me) just had to be put on the right track.

Now I remember why I had this confusion in the lists before. When I turned to you with this thread I just had broken off this sorting process before completion.

Today not! Processing 100%, but takes over a hour.


Tag browser - - - - - - - - home-file (processing)



EDIT Noticed only to your information: All metadata.opf files are gone!
It's no problem (to recover with Library metadata backup status)

[BetterRed]

@chaot - if you have a lot of pending metadata backup updates you can close calibre and run this command ==>> calibredb --backup_metadata

That will do them quickly - ie no built in delays.

BR

[chaot]

I struggle around now more than 2 hours with these calibredb commands and can't get it.

At beginning I processed with

calibredb backup_metadata

all the metadat.opf's back into home-file (takes 25 minutes).

Beside there was a terminal list (below a small excerpt).

...
99.9% 15231 - Ulysses
99.9% 15232 - Ulysses
99.9% 15233 - Dubliners
99.9% 15246 - Quick Start Guide
99.9% 15322 - Stadt Der Fremden
99.9% 15353 - Unknown
99.9% 15371 - Unknown
100.0% 15372 - Warentest [vie, 03 jul 2015]
100.0% 15378 - Worm. Der erste digitale Weltkrieg (GE)
100.0% 15379 - Warentest [sáb, 04 jul 2015]
100.0% 15380 - Warentest [lun, 06 jul 2015]
ali@puta:~$

Unfortunately my terminal scroll back was put on 1000, so shows only the last 1000 entries, but I want to see them all. I wonder, that there are 15380 entries, but caibre shows only 9089 books!?

Now only that

ali@puta:~$ calibredb backup_metadata
ali@puta:~$

Which command shows me that 15380 entries list again?

[theducks]

there is an unfortunate wrap in BRs post

all calibre commandline switches have --switchname

Do look at the online documentation

[BetterRed]

@chaot - If you want to force a rewrite of all the opf's use the '--all' switch. Without it the backup-metadata sub-command only backs up books that whose metadata is flagged as 'backup needed' (aka known as 'dirty').

BTW on what media is your library located. IIRC I ran the "backup-metadata --all' option on a 50,000+ book library a few months ago and it took a couple of minutes.

My library (metadata.db and books) is on a regular WD Black Caviar SATA 2 drive. There would not have been much else happening on the drive at the time. The drive is compressed, indexed and under AV watch - opfs are indexed by the MS XML IFilter.

BR

[MarjaE]

I'm having trouble here too.

Sorting by "last name" utterly breaks down with certain pen names, with Roman tria nomina, and so forth. Some of the metadata is wrong, too.

[eschwartz]

You'll need to fix the default sort values.

Right-click on an author link in the Book Details pane. Or right-click on Authors in the Tag Browser.
Select "Manage $author_name" -- or "Manage Authors".

This will allow you to modify Author Sort -- all future books will use that value.


Then select all (affected) books, and use Edit Metadata (it will enter bulk mode), check the box for "Automatically set author sort", and reset all your author_sort values based on the updated defaults.

[chaot]

Right-click on an author link in the Book Details pane. Or right-click on Authors in the Tag Browser.
Select "Manage $author_name" -- or "Manage Authors".

Somewhat more clear:
Right-click on an author link in the Book Details panel and select "Manage $author_name".
Or right-click on Authors in the Tag Browser and select "Manage Authors".

[eschwartz]

True enough.

[MarjaE]

How do I undo?

I broke the author column trying to fugure out what you meant. (Okay, had to search through preferences.)

I broke the author column again, trying to find "Manage Authors," (And had had to try three times through preferences to get it to stick.)

@#% interface!

I finally found the "Manage Authors" section, but I don't see any way to work this. I have coordination problems and chronic arm pain and can't manually type every author's sort value as well as every author's name. It has a tool to manually copy sort values over names, but not to manually copy naes to use as sort values. I finally figured out that I can copy and paste if I double-click in each cell.