Sorting books by title

[Laurentiu]

Hello,

I noticed that Calibre is msart enough to detect an article at the beginning of the title. This way, 'The Client' is sorted correctly under 'C'. However, things are not that clear when it comes to other languages - for example, Nietsche's book Der Antichrist appears under 'D'. Is there a way to alter the setting and add der/die/das for German, so that books in this language appear in the right order?

Thanks a lot for your answer.

Laurentiu

[chaley]

Sorry, but no. And don't forget de, du, di, un/une/una (in the sense of 'a', not 'one'), etc.

However, this is prime tweak territory. Perhaps someone is willing to contribute the code?

[Laurentiu]

Originally Posted by chaley

Sorry, but no. And don't forget de, du, di, un/une/una (in the sense of 'a', not 'one'), etc.

However, this is prime tweak territory. Perhaps someone is willing to contribute the code?

I have not forgotten le/la/l'/les either This should be flexible enough, so that the user can create/edit it's own list, as needed.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Until someone does come up with code for it, a kludge would be to list it as Antichrist, Der.

We have author sort in the metadata screen; why not one for book titles? The entry in that field could automatically default to the exisiting title. (And, please, don't suggest I write code for it; I have no clue how to do so.)

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

We have author sort in the metadata screen; why not one for book titles?

We already have one. It's the "sort" field in the "books" table of metadata.db.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Starson17

We already have one. It's the "sort" field in the "books" table of metadata.db.

News to me. Where does one find that?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

News to me. Where does one find that?

Can I be snarky (with a smile) and say:
It's the "sort" field in the "books" table of metadata.db.

If not, I'll point to the tweaks:

# Control title and series sorting in the library view.
# If set to 'library_order', Leading articles such as The and A will be ignored.
# If set to 'strictly_alphabetic', the titles will be sorted without processing
# For example, with library_order, The Client will sort under 'C'. With
# strictly_alphabetic, the book will sort under 'T'.
# This flag affects Calibre's library display. It has no effect on devices. In
# addition, titles for books added before changing the flag will retain their
# order until the title is edited. Double-clicking on a title and hitting return
# without changing anything is sufficient to change the sort.
title_series_sorting = 'library_order'

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

News to me. Where does one find that?

I don,t believe you can without being places that only the Guru's should even think about
SQLite Database browser will let you "peek", but it is best to keep your hands off

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by theducks

I don,t believe you can without being places that only the Guru's should even think about
SQLite Database browser will let you "peek", but it is best to keep your hands off

It should be pretty easy to provide access to this, if anyone really needs it, just as access to author_sort is provided. I suspect eventually someone will ask for it in a bug/feature enhancement request. Personally, I don't need any more options or complexity, but there's always someone out there who's bugged by the sort order of a title and wants more control.

[chaley]

Title sort uses the RE

_title_pat = re.compile('^(A|The|An)\s+', re.IGNORECASE)

It wouldn't be outrageously difficult to add a tweak to change the pattern to any sequence of words or what-have-you.

Adding read/write GUI access would require much more work, because the sort field is filled in by a DB trigger.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Uh, guys, there is a reason I chose the confused looking old lady avatar (besides the fact I'm a confused old lady). You have to keep in mind I need very, very simple explainations/ directions for pretty much everything. Fortunately, theducks (thank you) spelled it out that isn't something easily accessed by a fuddyduddy fogey like me.

[Laurentiu]

Originally Posted by Starson17

We already have one. It's the "sort" field in the "books" table of metadata.db.

Where is that metadata.db table? A search on the calibre folder did not find anything.

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by Laurentiu

Where is that metadata.db table? A search on the calibre folder did not find anything.

metadata.db is a FILE that is the main calibre database holding metadata and is normally located at the root of the Calibre library. Mess with it at your peril

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Laurentiu

Where is that metadata.db table? A search on the calibre folder did not find anything.

It's in the root of the Calibre Library. It is the Calibre database. You can't edit the sort field directly due to the trigger. For the adventurous, it's possible to DROP the trigger, change that field, then CREATE it back, but any change to the sort field would be overwritten during the following UPDATE, which starts the trigger. You'd have to change the code that Charles pointed to to keep the change. (I don't recommend this, but I was interested, so I wrote a bit of test code to do this, and I tried it manually. Both worked, but it's still possible that it has side effects I didn't notice.)