MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Side-loaded pdfs not displaying title, author, covers correctly in some cases on Kobo

davidfor · 07-01-2022, 12:15 AM

Honestly, this is probably working as designed. Or working as broken by the various parties involved, but, mainly Adobe.

But, just to check, by "all details are correct when I view the books in Calibre", do you mean when looking at the PDF book detail calibre? Or have you actually opened the book with a PDF viewer and checked it that way? I suspect the former.

The issue is the PDF format. Calibre cannot update all of the metadata in PDFs when sending them to the device. That means the title you see on the Kobo device is what was in the PDF when you added it to calibre. Opening the PDF on the PC will show this.

The same basically applies to cover. Except in that case, what Kobo is render the start of the PDF and take the first page as the cover. Calibre would have to rebuild the PDF to change this.

There are some workarounds. The KoboTouch driver can generate and send the cover to the Kobo device separately to the book. This will mean the device does not do the cover generation from the book. And the driver can also update the metadata for the book directly to the database. That means you need to send the book to the device, disconnect and let the device import the book and then connect again. At that point, the driver can update any metadata differences between the calibre library and what the device pulled from the book during the import. This will also update other metadata that the device does not read, such as the series information. If you don't want to do that automatically, my Kobo Utilities plugin has function to do both the cover updating and the metadata updates.

07-01-2022, 12:15 AM	#2
davidfor Grand Sorcerer Posts: 24,905 Karma: 47303824 Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Sydney, Australia Device: Kobo:Touch,Glo, AuraH2O, GloHD,AuraONE, ClaraHD, Libra H2O; tolinoepos	Honestly, this is probably working as designed. Or working as broken by the various parties involved, but, mainly Adobe. But, just to check, by "all details are correct when I view the books in Calibre", do you mean when looking at the PDF book detail calibre? Or have you actually opened the book with a PDF viewer and checked it that way? I suspect the former. The issue is the PDF format. Calibre cannot update all of the metadata in PDFs when sending them to the device. That means the title you see on the Kobo device is what was in the PDF when you added it to calibre. Opening the PDF on the PC will show this. The same basically applies to cover. Except in that case, what Kobo is render the start of the PDF and take the first page as the cover. Calibre would have to rebuild the PDF to change this. There are some workarounds. The KoboTouch driver can generate and send the cover to the Kobo device separately to the book. This will mean the device does not do the cover generation from the book. And the driver can also update the metadata for the book directly to the database. That means you need to send the book to the device, disconnect and let the device import the book and then connect again. At that point, the driver can update any metadata differences between the calibre library and what the device pulled from the book during the import. This will also update other metadata that the device does not read, such as the series information. If you don't want to do that automatically, my Kobo Utilities plugin has function to do both the cover updating and the metadata updates.