I am running the latest version on Vista and just noticed that the author sorting on the main panel is not working properly.
I have stored the Authors like "Firstname Lastname", but specified sorting according to "Lastname, Firstname" for each book. I could swear that that was working OK until I upgraded to the latest version (0.7.19). At any rate, it is broken in this version, as in the main panel Author is sorted as a string (=sorts on first name, the author string is stored like that).
However, in the left panel (tags) the Authors tag is working properly (i.e. even if it display Firstname Lastname, it sort on Lastname).
This is all confusing and not easy to deal with. I'd like to suggest that separate strings are introduced (author_first_name, author_last_name, author_middlename(s)) and the author fields become configurable. Please consider it, it would be a big improvement.
Having the author list as "Lastname, Firstname" in both the main panel and the Tags panel would be a definite improvement.
Currently, under settings, we have
"(?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)"
as a regular expression for the metadata extracted from file names. This regex is not working for me, in fact if I type in "title - first last" as a string, and press test, nothing happens, the fields below are not populated at all. Therefore I could not test alternatives.
Thus it is difficult to deal with files stored as
"Lastname, Firstname - Title", which is the most common format used (as it sorts in any file browser well).
On a further note: sorting works on English characters only and can not deal with accented characters. Thus is sorts "á" after "z", which is very unusual and confusing. I suggest to use sort algorithms that either ignore accents or sort the accented character according to ISO standard (aäáà...b...oöő..). Please consider this improvement for the sake of us who read in foreign languages.
A further suggestion: please consider to introduce a new tag: language. I know that one can define own tags "English, French, etc.", but that is not quite the same thing. The language of a books is an important entry in a library catalog.
Thank you,
Mixx
PS: I just noticed the
other thread and that there is a new version of Calibre (that fixes the first issue above). Amazing reaction time, thanks! My other comments remain valid.