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Old 11-24-2025, 09:28 PM   #5
memory_dump
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First off, thanks for the feedback. It's good to know at least one person out there has tried it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose View Post
First, you said that it's possible to add DriveThruRPG item categories and filters, but what exactly does that cover? Whatever they cover, downloading the meta data seems to pull in a lot of duplicate and not particularly helpful tags, so it might be nice if we could have a bit more fine grained control over what gets imported, at the settings level. I'm hoping there might be a way to clean up some of the manual cleanup that way.
There are two fields included in the item metadata returned from the DriveThruRPG API that include tag-like entries: 'Categories' and 'Filters'. I added options in the plugin settings to include the contents of one or both into the Tags. In this case, we're entirely at the mercy of what's included in the API output. I agree that they are sometimes not particularly helpful, which is why I made them optional. Do you have some specific suggestions about how to include fine-grained control?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose View Post
Beyond that, it would also be really useful if there was a defined way to include the rule system in such a way that you could tell it's a rule system without comparing it to a list of rule systems. The goal would be to have some way to easily sort or filter by rule system, just like you can sort and filter by author and publisher. My naive suggestion would be co-opting the Series field, since it's a dedicated field and TTRPGs are unlikely to make use of it, but I'm rather new to Calibre and I don't know if something else, like structured tags, would be better.
I agree, it would be useful. My solution for this was to add two custom columns to my RPG Calibre library. One column is of the Type "Text, but with a fixed set of permitted values". I populated that custom column with values that make sense to me based on the items in my library: Adventure, Art, Bestiary, Character Sheet, Map, Quickstart, Reference, Rulebook, and Supplement. After I add a new item, I just click the column and pick the appropriate value from the drop-down. The second custom column is of Type "Comma separated text, like tags" and I use that one to enter System names (like '5e D&D', 'DCC RPG', 'Traveller', 'Troika!', etc.).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose View Post
By the same token, would it be possible to automatically add a TTRPG tag to any content that has its meta data downloaded, so it would be easier to separate out TTRPG material from regular books.
Maybe? Probably? I solved this by making a Calibre library just for my RPG books & materials, separate from my regular books. It's also trivial to select multiple books, Edit metadata in bulk, and add a tag to all the books.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsilon Rose View Post
Finally, the whole process seems very manual, especially if you need to find the DriveThruRPG ID, manually copy it into the Id field, run the download for a single file, and then manually clean up the tags field. (And it's even worse if you can't copy and paste, for unrelated reasons). Is there any way to automate the process a bit more, or at least make it a bit less individual?
For one, you don't have to acquire the DTRPG Id and copy it into the Id field, you can always try your luck with search by Title. I usually start with Title search, and then switch to manually entering the Id if Title search fails. You can also try your luck with selecting multiple titles and downloading metadata for all of them at once, but I don't know how that would interact with the "Keep more than one entry per souce" option, and frankly I'm afraid to try.
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