MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How to prevent pubdate reformating when sending to device?

maraskan_user · 04-15-2021, 04:33 AM

I have an issue with pubdates getting changed in unwanted ways on sending to device. (I am aware that the formating itself can be changed by the setting "Format dates as:" in the "Sending books to devices" category, but there seems no way to set it to actually not reformat dates at all.)

Say I have an epub titled "BookTitle" with pubdate "1981-01-01".
"Format dates as" is set to "%Y-%m-%d".

The book then will end up on the device as
"(1980-12-31) BookTitle.epub"

Notice that the date has shifted, probably because of some timezone reasons.

The weird part is, when I sent to device yesterday evening it used the date 1981-01-01, while when resending today it used 1980-12-31 which led to unwanted duplicates on the device. I haven't figured out yet, at what time in the day sending to device creates the 1981 filename vs. the 1980 one.

I tried circumventing Calibre reformating the date by using a custom column {#customname} which is defined as "({pubdate}) {title}".
The custom column in Calibre correctly shows "(1980-12-31) BookTitle".
My hope was that Calibre would treat this as a blackbox string it would not mess with while sending to device, since it couldn't even know that the contained date wasn't part of the book's title or something.

No luck though, the filename on export was still changed to "(1980-12-31) BookTitle.epub"

So my question is: Is there any way of stopping Calibre messing with the pubdate in filenames on export?

04-15-2021, 04:33 AM	#1
maraskan_user Member Posts: 12 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2020 Location: Germany Device: Boox Nova 3, Galaxy Tab S6, Samsung M21	How to prevent pubdate reformating when sending to device? I have an issue with pubdates getting changed in unwanted ways on sending to device. (I am aware that the formating itself can be changed by the setting "Format dates as:" in the "Sending books to devices" category, but there seems no way to set it to actually not reformat dates at all.) Say I have an epub titled "BookTitle" with pubdate "1981-01-01". "Format dates as" is set to "%Y-%m-%d". The book then will end up on the device as "(1980-12-31) BookTitle.epub" Notice that the date has shifted, probably because of some timezone reasons. The weird part is, when I sent to device yesterday evening it used the date 1981-01-01, while when resending today it used 1980-12-31 which led to unwanted duplicates on the device. I haven't figured out yet, at what time in the day sending to device creates the 1981 filename vs. the 1980 one. I tried circumventing Calibre reformating the date by using a custom column {#customname} which is defined as "({pubdate}) {title}". The custom column in Calibre correctly shows "(1980-12-31) BookTitle". My hope was that Calibre would treat this as a blackbox string it would not mess with while sending to device, since it couldn't even know that the contained date wasn't part of the book's title or something. No luck though, the filename on export was still changed to "(1980-12-31) BookTitle.epub" So my question is: Is there any way of stopping Calibre messing with the pubdate in filenames on export?