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Old 08-28-2012, 05:01 PM   #4
chaley
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jade Aislin View Post
So, I should make a custom column that looks for specific authors from the authors column to populate itself?

For example, if I have authors A and B. I set the custom column to look for author A to put in its field. When it goes through the list of authors it pulls author A and leaves author B alone. Then I would have a field that had only the authors I wanted in my collections and could use that custom column to make my collections.
You are describing an "ultimate" solution -- a custom column that contains the items (authors) for whom you want collections made. In this case you would use a "column made from other columns, behaves like tags" so that you could put multiple values in the column. The problem: author names frequently contain commas, making this column type potentially problematic. You can avoid this by changing the commas to semicolons (or something).

If you make a tags-like column that contains names, then you could manually add author names with commas. However, this is a pain because you would need to manually update every book.

If you know in advance the authors, then the best solution is to write a custom template function that extracts those authors, changing characters as needed. Second best would be to write a template in General Program Mode that does the same thing, but this would be much slower. Both solutions require some level of programming know-how.

Apologies, but what you want to do is at the edge of what calibre does. It is possible to achieve, but not easily.
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