Changes in this release:- Add a "Check series pubdate order" menu option, which will report series where the published date is not in order with the series.
- Rename "Check titlecase" to "Check title for titlecase"
- Add a "Check authors for case" option to look for author names that are all uppercase or lowercase.
- Add a "Check missing" submenu, with options to perform searches for books missing title, authors, isbn, pubdate, publisher, tags, rating, comments, languages, cover, formats
This release addresses some of the recent posts on this thread plus a personal bugbear of mine.
Some of you asked for menu options as shortcuts for identifying missing metadata in calibre. As per the attached screenshot there is a new menu called "Check missing" which has various options for performing searches that could otherwise be directly typed into the search bar of calibre.
A recent request above asked for checking the casing of authors - I have added a new menu option on the Check metadata menu which looks for all uppercase or all lowercase author names.
The final addition was a "Check series pubdate order". This looks at books that are in a series, and compares the published date increases across the series.
Why add this check? Primarily it is of interest if you have a Kindle, and use the "sort by Author" within a collection, as this allows you to see a series correctly in order if the pubdate is set correctly. Yes you can use metadata plugboards to put the series in the title, but if you have books not in a series (but still want to read in published order) you will want to have sort by Author set on your Kindle rather than sort by Title.
It is also a way of picking up some cases of where the calibre metadata download has screwed up and stored incorrect publication dates. This is a known calibre issue that my attempts to convince Kovid to fix have been unsuccessful so far (but maybe one day it will happen!). Metadata download currently ignores any published dates from the metadata plugins (like Fantastic Fiction) and instead uses Worldcat to lookup based on the ISBN. Unfortunately the result is frequently wildly wrong from my experience. I have ideas for an alternate implementation that Kovid has approved a patch for in concept, but sadly I lack the skills to implement it myself.
Note there is a special exemption for books with series index below 1 - as I know many people like to put omnibus editions or related book entries as 0.x entries and these will frequently be from a later date than the first book in the series.
Of course there will always be series where published date does not coincide with reading order, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule and this should work well for the majority of series.