Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats
Oh, I didn't realize it was possible to change the longtext column type after the fact.  Seems to be working fine  |
I was confused a bit at first about the Saved Metadata long text column and HTML versus plain text. And I was also surprised you can just flip that from HTML to Text and back again easily.
The "interpret this column as" option appears to tell calibre how to show you the column data (the data itself is not changed). If you choose HTML, when you look at the data, you see it as if you were looking at a web page (with all that formatting in use). If you choose "Text" it is interpreted as or shown as Text (which would be like viewing the source code of a web page, so you'd see all the tags and whatnot).
I like to sometimes look at Saved Metadata at the bottom of Book Details as a way of comparing what I have in my own columns to what data is available in Saved Metadata. So having it interpreted as HTML means I can easily read it there; whereas if it is interpreted as Text, it shows up as code (which I'm geeky enough to understand, but reading HTML code as code is not nearly as nice to look at or easy to read).
The problem comes if you edit Saved Metadata while you have it interpreted as HTML. If you have it visible on the Edit Metadata screen and edit it while it is interpreted as HTML, the code will get messed up and your Saved Metadata won't be useful anymore. It's because of how the HTML editor works, I guess, changing the code beneath what is visible on your screen. Whereas if you have it interpreted as and visible as text (code) in Edit Metadata, you probably could edit it safely. (Though it seems like a bad idea to edit it at all.)
In that epic calibre/FanFicFare guide I'm working on, I explain this (better, I hope, with screenshots to give examples). I also instruct folks to go to calibre Preferences / Look & feel / Edit Metadata and remove all the FanFicFare special columns (Saved Metadata, Errors, FFF Updated) from their Edit Metadata page, that way they won't mistakenly edit them (or be tempted to edit them). (It's always easy enough to return them if you need to get to them, but it's safest to not have them there.)
If I understand things correctly, if you don't touch Saved Metadata (on purpose or by accident), it should be safe to have it interpreted as HTML. If you ever decide you need to edit it for some reason, it's easy enough to change the column settings to "interpret this column as" to Text before you do anything.
(I wound up fetching data out of an older calibre Library where I'd named my Saved Metadata something different than I did in my current one. I ended up using bulk search & replace to move Saved Metadata from one column to another for some works and then I made darn sure both the columns involved were interpreted as text before I tackled it.)
I think I have this right (please correct me if I'm wrong).