My apologies if these have already been asked. I've searched the forums but I can't seem to find anything that answers my question.
A few questions (probably very obvious answers that I'm missing):
First, I am using the "General Metadata" 3-part method to add series tagging (I only discovered this new method eschwartz posted today, and I'm not entirely certain what all it does so I haven't tried it yet.) The only thing I changed on the General Metadata method was that I made the hyphenated version 6,-,6 instead of 4,-,4 because nothing is more annoying than seeing a hyphen "Mountains" abbreviated to "Moun-ains".
12 letters seems to be a good cut-off with the one-word series I have.
Anyway. When I first installed the plugboard, it worked great. Exactly as it was meant to. And when I changed the 4s to 6s, it did what I wanted it to with the titles (though I'm not entirely sure how to get it to update those titles on my PW (v1) except for removing the books and re-sideloading them.)
However. When I cashed in my gift cards and bought a new batch of ebooks and tried to add them, it would not send them to the PW with the series in the titles. So I have some books on the PW with (for example) "[ABCD] Book in ABCD series" and then more recent ones from that same series with just "Book in ABCD series". I don't know why it's not doing the changes for the most recent additions (likely I'm missing something, but I can't find what.)
Second: When I have a series with an ampersand in the title (ex. "Fine & Dandy") the abbreviated form comes out "F& D." Is there some way to get rid of that space between the ampersand and the second initial?
Third: Has anyone figured out how to do a plugboard to strip the "personal" banner from mobi docs with PDOC the personal doc field rather than having to re-convert the files? I saw it mentioned as a possibility in another thread about getting rid of the personal banner but the person discussing it hadn't had any success. Has someone cracked this problem, yet?
Thank you so much and happy holidays!
ETA: One more thing, though it's a little out of the scope of this particular thread. When setting up user categories (which are then made into Kindle collections), I would like to create user categories to shorten my lists of authors (Authors A-D, E-H, I-M etc etc.) Right now what I'm doing is I'm adding a tag (Author A-D, or whatever) to the tags, and then adding that tag to the custom user category.
But that is a bit clunky because it means each time I have to add a batch of books, I have to go through and add the appropriate tag, unlike, for example, a user category by series or author name where it gets updated automatically (assuming the series/author name is correct when the book is added, of course).
Would there be some way to make this more of an automated process, if the author's last name begins with a certain letter?
And to make it even more complex, say the I want to sort by author groups withinin a particular genre. If something has a tag of, say "Urban Fantasy" or "Romance" or whatever, could I sort it by author then? I'm not good enough with composing searches to come with with that specific of a search, and then I don't know how to translate those search results into something I can add to a custom user category.
Thank you again!