@Lady Fitzgerald: I wasn't sure if this was a good idea but in the end I've gone for it anyway...
I've gone to some effort to help you understand the whole of this LN, FN thing in calibre.
I've taken what I feel are the most relevant and helpful parts of the advice in this thread. In some cases I've taken the liberty of slightly changing the wording and I've put some quotes in a different order (apologies to the orginal posters; the changes are minimal).
It's all aimed at making it simpler to understand for you and anyone else who may stop by this thread with similar needs.
My next post is the post I'm talking about but I want to give some introductory words first; if I put this bit in that post (my next one, below) I feel it will clutter and dilute it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald
It's a royal pain the a$$ to have to retype in the author name every cotton pickin' time I add a book, which is what I had to do when the tweek was in place.
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You don't really have to do that.
My touble is that in trying to explain why, and the other solutions, I have to introduce new things and use lots of words that make the whole thing sound even more complicated.
But please bear with me; it's not complicated at all in reality and the extra things are only mentioned to actually
make things easier.
If you follow all the steps in my next post, you are looking good and you will soon see that what you're trying to achieve is easy and you'll fall into a swift and painless workflow. And breathe a sigh of relief.
I know that the 'copy Tweak' seemd to break things for you but it really wasn't the culprit.
I am already doing exactly what you want to do and I am very new to calibre and far dumber than you - and I've got to a point where I'm perfectly happy with the LN, FN thing. It's a breeze.
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That's it really for a preface for my next post but I want to mention two of the 'new things' just in passing. I'll not go into detail yet about them (nor in the next post) but it's just in order to sow the seed so that you are hopefully reassured that things will soon be very easy and painless.
Please don't even bother looking into these two things properly yet; it's more important to get the basics done first (i.e. follow the instructions in my next post).
However, as I say, just to sow the seed and to make you realize that there are other things that will help along the process and make you not regret sticking with your "LN, FN" policy, here's a taster for now ...
1. There is another thing that the Quality Check plugin does. It can find all your authors that don't have commas in them. This effectively finds all the authors that have "FN LN" instead of "LN, FN". So that means that you don't have to worry when adding books to instantly correct the way the authors' names are formatted. You can come back to them later and do them all at once.
2. There is another plugin called Find Duplicates that does more than just that. One thing, for instance, would have helped you with similar authors missing middle initials and that sort of thing. It can show you all these grouoed together and fix them with a single click to either add or remove those middle initials and other discrepancies.
It does lots more but the point is that it can find
similar entries and it's very useful.
Both these plugins are written by kiwidude. He gives them to us for free (donations gratefully received of course) and he's got loads more plugins too. His plugins are absolutely invaluable and freakin' awesome.
I know you've ended up having a minor spat with him in this thread but please realize what a helpful person he is and that he's only trying to help you in this thread. I'm not getting involved on that matter beyond that one statement; it's none of my business. All I'm doing here (and especially in my next post) is trying to simplify and condense the advice from this thread to make the "LN, FN" thing easier for you and everybody. It's worked for me.
Thanks to everybody for the advice and I'm sorry if my next post omits anything vital and particularly if I've butchered any of your posts inappropriately.
Here it comes....