[haertig]

Originally Posted by chaley

...templates can be written in Template Program Mode or General Program Mode, neither of which have that restriction.

Thanks. I just looked into that (cursory glance). I'm pretty sure I can do what I want using those more advanced programming modes. Just a bit more reading required on my part to learn the specifics. Time will tell if it is worth the effort trying to develop the template that I want. I can always brute force things when I download a book to my Kindle. Go into Calibre and manually change a books Title and Series to what I want displayed on the Kindle, use a standard template to download that book to my Kindle, then return the books Title and Series to their original values. For someone like me who only transfers one or two books to my Kindle per month, this kludge may be good enough, even though it is not elegant in the slightest. My previous programmer self (before retirement) is screaming "No, don't go that kludge route!", but my practical self is countering with "Yeah, but it only takes a few seconds to do a kludge download, and then you're done with it (until the next book)."

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the documentation though, which would be very nice, is some way to test your templates. Something where you could manually feed the fields to your template and observe what the template will make of those. As best I have been able to determine, the only way to test your template is to make it live in Calibre, then do a real transfer to your Kindle, and then observe on the Kindle what the result was. Then change the template, and repeat the process until you achieve success. It would be handy if there were a little "test window" in Calibre so you didn't have to keep plugging in your Kindle, downloading a book, deleting that book if your template failed, then twiddle the template and download to the Kindle again. Maybe I missed something, but this somewhat cumbersome process seems to be the only way to do any testing.