MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - cleaning metadata and mac keyboard shortcuts in dialog boxes

mseiden · 09-23-2017, 08:24 PM

greetings. i'm a longtime user of calibre on the mac, but have never gotten beyond the n00bie driver stage. i keep up with the weeklies, however.

recently i've been cleaning up a lot of metadata in a large library. the typical workflow is many repetitions of {"extract isbn"; "download metadata" for those items for which an isbn was successfully extracted, as denoted by a pushpin helpfully placed in the item number}.

when i receive the confirmation dialog box, which seems to suggest based on underlining that Y or N will be acceptable shortcuts for Yes and No, i can't get those to work. No combination of bare y or Y or with any of the modifier keys (in the mac but not the calibre tradition) will make the dialog disappear. instead the keys are sent to the main window and result in searching down the list to the next book beginning with a Y, which is unhelpful.

even after clicking in the dialog none of the keyboard shortcuts work as expected. so it isn't a window focus problem. this is true for all confirmation dialogs in calibre, as far as i can tell.

can anyone make a suggestion?

as a comment:

i would be just as happy to entirely dispense with all of those dialogs and have a "silent mode" custom version of "download metadata for selected items with pushpins next to them." or a combined plugin which did both functions with no annoying dialogs whatsoever.

(my experience is that absent an isbn, download metadata produces bizarre results when the match with the actual book is not very good, typically when the author's name doesn't match.)

despite any nitpicking, thanks for all of your hard work, kiwidude and kovid.

09-23-2017, 08:24 PM	#1
mseiden Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2013 Device: kindle	cleaning metadata and mac keyboard shortcuts in dialog boxes greetings. i'm a longtime user of calibre on the mac, but have never gotten beyond the n00bie driver stage. i keep up with the weeklies, however. recently i've been cleaning up a lot of metadata in a large library. the typical workflow is many repetitions of {"extract isbn"; "download metadata" for those items for which an isbn was successfully extracted, as denoted by a pushpin helpfully placed in the item number}. when i receive the confirmation dialog box, which seems to suggest based on underlining that Y or N will be acceptable shortcuts for Yes and No, i can't get those to work. No combination of bare y or Y or with any of the modifier keys (in the mac but not the calibre tradition) will make the dialog disappear. instead the keys are sent to the main window and result in searching down the list to the next book beginning with a Y, which is unhelpful. even after clicking in the dialog none of the keyboard shortcuts work as expected. so it isn't a window focus problem. this is true for all confirmation dialogs in calibre, as far as i can tell. can anyone make a suggestion? as a comment: i would be just as happy to entirely dispense with all of those dialogs and have a "silent mode" custom version of "download metadata for selected items with pushpins next to them." or a combined plugin which did both functions with no annoying dialogs whatsoever. (my experience is that absent an isbn, download metadata produces bizarre results when the match with the actual book is not very good, typically when the author's name doesn't match.) despite any nitpicking, thanks for all of your hard work, kiwidude and kovid.