[davidfor]

Originally Posted by chaley

Because I didn't see the point, and TBH I still don't see the point. Plugboards exist to permit people to put non-standard data into standard device-specific fields that readers use to categorize books. No reader that I know of uses comments for that purpose.

I think the difference of opinion here is the word "categorize". To me, the plugboards are so that the device can display information. When I was putting the series info the title, that is all I wanted. I wanted to be able to see what series a book belonged to. Being able to sort the series books together was almost just a side benefit.

I'm using the comments to show information that the device won't otherwise show. That information is used when choosing a book. Page and word counts are much better indication of book length than file size. And the device doesn't display tags, so having them in the comments is useful. I could create collections for the tags, but, that doesn't show all the tags associated with a book in one glance.

Adding comments means a maintenance problem, feature requests e.g., to do html processing in the plugboard, and who-knows-what such as "Why stop with comments? Why not allow plugboards to change any metadata field?"

True, but as good a question is, "Why not?" I don't think there is much use fiddling with a field that no device uses or displays. And that is pretty much any custom column. But, I could imagine someone wanting to set a timestamp somewhere to indicate when the book was sent out of calibre. Otherwise, the comments is the only one that I see as missing, but someone else might have a reason for something else.

You can use search/replace to change comments or construct another custom field however you want, especially with template mode. If needed keep the "real" comments in a custom column and modify the built-in comments field. If the changes are per-device then you can use Reading List to help manage which S/R to run. You can use Cleaning Comments to remove HTML.

Sorry, that's a really ugly idea. It's similar to the common question new users about how to add the series information into the title in the calibre library. And a bit impractical. All the metadata source plugins want to put something in the comments field, and explicitly can't populate custom columns. If I do a metadata download, I have to then copy it elsewhere and then copy back the information I want.

Bottom line: I am not convinced that it is worth my trouble. @davidfor: you are welcome to take this on, committing your existing change.

OK. I haven't really looked through the code that applies the plugboard. I've been careful with the HTML my template produced, so I haven't worried much about what happens next.