Calibre cannot but be complex, owing to the source material.
Kovid and crew have done brilliantly in designing, improving and maintaining such a flexible and powerful system for managing it all.
No only that, but the manuals, help videos, etc. + the indefatigable experts in this forum are a tremendous help.
Even with all these sources to draw from, I find myself becoming mired in the options and unavoidable complexities.
I love the fact that there are options to sort so thoroughly (it's like bibliophile crack).
You can sort multi-series/sagas (such as the Riftwar saga) properly, you can create proper multi-genre/sub-genre classifications ... the list goes on.
The questions about how it all interrelates, and what each element does, grow too, however.
Some questions:
What are the differences between user categories, custom columns and groups?
Generally, how do they allow you to use/manipulate the metadata?
How can they affect metadata, such as when saving-to-disk?
It appears that some custom columns can be considered user categories too?
What's the difference between metadata fields like {author} and {author_sort} or {title} and {title_sort}?
Example 1:
With the Riftwar books (by Raymond, E. Feist), there is the overall saga with various chronological series and some of the series tie in together.
A possible order might be:
Riftwar (overall series/saga)
- 1. The Riftwar Saga
- 2. The Empire Trilogy
- 3.1 Krondor's Sons
- 3.2 Legends of the Riftwar
- 3.3 Riftwar Legacy
- 4. Serpentwar Saga
- 5. Conclave of Shadows, etc
I'd like to represent this in Calibre and be able to transfer this info to disk/device, but am unsure which combination of columns/categories/groups to use without tying myself into knots.
Example 2:
Chaley put together an excellent
explanation of how to manage Genres, using custom columns.
Until I read that post I hadn't a clue how to populate a custom column.
I had tried another route by:
- creating a user category and
- using tags as a filter.
- This way, it was easy to select from the tags those that represented genres.
My method seemed easier - I was merely manipulating info that was already there rather than having to create it.
I couldn't create a custom column from that list, though.
What is the difference between these methods, I wonder?
What limitations does each one come with?
I know Chaley included an explanation of the differences between tags and user categories and custom columns/groups but I can't follow that though.
It is somewhat like listening to an explanation of advanced physics - the overall conclusion makes sense but I get lost when trying to folow the explanation of how the conclusion is derived.
My motive in asking all this is not to elicit hand-holding or get others to do the hard yards for me.
I find myself stalled in my understanding:
- in a "the big picture is just SO big" kind of way and
- in a "can't see the forest for the trees" kind of way
I suspect I'm not the only newbie who is struggling with these concepts and how to use them concretely.
I'm wanting to stimulate some discussion on these ideas that would help further my (and others) understanding,
Hopefully, this would lead to me being more of a help and less a hindrance in future - grow the pool of experienced and clued-up users by helping some newbies over the initial barriers.