[chaley]

Originally Posted by Mixx

I am running the latest version on Vista and just noticed that the author sorting on the main panel is not working properly.

This has already been fixed. Please see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99035

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.

My guess is that this won't happen. At least, it is certain that I won't do it.

Having the author list as "Lastname, Firstname" in both the main panel and the Tags panel would be a definite improvement.

You can already do this. I know, because I do and have done for months.

You need to change a 'tweak' to change how author sort is calculated from author. Go to preferences -> advanced -> tweaks and look at the

# The algorithm used to copy author to author_sort
# Possible values are:
#  invert: use "fn ln" -> "ln, fn" (the original algorithm)
#  copy  : copy author to author_sort without modification
#  comma : use 'copy' if there is a ',' in the name, otherwise use 'invert'
#  nocomma : "fn ln" -> "ln fn" (without the comma)
author_sort_copy_method = 'invert'

You would want either copy or comma.

You then must enter/change your author names in LN, FN order. Only you can do that. Once that is done, use the 'manage authors' dialog to verify that the sort strings are as you wish.

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.

Confused.

Why don't you change the regular expression to be what you want?

Ahhh ... perhaps it is the extension issue? The file name in the test string must have an extension, just as a real file name would have. For example, enter 'title - first last.epub'.

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).

Actually, Firstname Lastname is the most common. Those of us who want Lastname, Firstname are definitely in the minority. Strange, I know...

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.

It is wrong, but it isn't unusual. Sorting correctly across all character sets across the world is hard. I have looked for a solution. There are very few available, and most of them don't work in more than a few countries.

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.

Confused....

You can put any tag you want on a book. You can also create a custom column for language, which you can fill in however you want.

Are you asking for something else?