[chaley]

Originally Posted by Joanna

Thanks for your clarifications about column types.

So if I understand correctly, "contains names" basically behaves like the Authors column, i.e you use the ampersand to separate items?

Yes. It is also sorted by entry order, not alphabetically.

What kind of column would you use to put the original title of the book, assuming that one book has no more than one original title and that the original title may include commas? Would that be a single-value column custom text column?

Yes, except see below.

And is there any way to display that original title in italics, other than using a series column? (In fact, this what I'm doing now, as I started entering original titles, having realized I wanted to group various language versions of one book together, and I was thinking about them as a kind of a 'series'. Obviously, it's not the best approach, as the order of books here is irrelevant. (I used 1 for original, 2 for a translation into my mother tongue etc. but it's not intuitive and redundant.))

There are two ways to display info in "non-standard" ways in book details: custom comments columns and custom columns built from other columns (a "composite" column) with the "Display as HTML" box checked. Which, if either, to choose depends on how you want to use the data and where the data comes from.

If you choose a comments column then you have total control over the contents and the HTML, along with an HTML editor to enter the data. Along with this control comes the requirement that you enter all the data you want to see, even if that data exists somewhere else. These columns will not show in the tag browser and show on the right in book details.

If you choose a composite column then you can combine information from other columns in rather arbitrary ways, and you can show these values in the tag browser. For example, if you have a single-value column "#original_title" that contains the obvious thing, then you can make a composite column (another custom column) that shows the "main" title in normal text along with the original title in italics. This mash-up can be shown in book details instead of the main title.

The following template, if used in a composite column with the HTML box checked, will show the normal title then the original title in italicized green.

{title} - <font color="green" style="font-style: italic;">{#original_title}</font>

One downside with composite columns is that they can be slow. If you have a reasonably powered computer with enough memory and only a few composite columns then the slowness shouldn't even appear until 5,000 to 10,000 books. It may never be enough to worry about, especially if the templates are not complicated.

Templates are documented here. See the section Using templates in custom columns for more info about composite columns.

In fact, can you somehow control how various categories are displayed in book details? (I don't usually have the title displayed but now I've realized that with most of the categories being clickable and, at least on my computer, shown in blue, the title might be the hardest one to notice ).

No, other than as explained above.