Quote:
Originally Posted by itimpi
I would have though a more useful version of this enhancement would be to examine the author field for a comma, and if there is one present copy it across unchanged to the author-sort field when requested to set the author-sort field automatically. If there is no comma behave as now.
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I thought about the comma issue, when I proposed some code (included as of 0.6.35) that splits lastname, firstname middlename format titles at the comma instead of the space between firstname and middlename . I have found a few author names that have commas preceding Jr., Sr. or the IIIrd, so I'd hesitate to use the presence of a comma as a guaranteed marker for the desire to copy author unchanged into author_sort. I'd think an option box would be necessary to avoid changing current behavior too much.
Although I've used lastname, firstname format in my directories for 20+ years, I'm now comfortable with the calibre default. However, when I first started using it, I did consider trying to force it to do it "my" way. AFAICT, a global copy of the name field of the authors table into the author_sort field of the books table in the metadata.db SQL file should not cause any problems. You can't do that sort of change with author name or book title without screwing up the directory structure and database, but I think it's OK to change author_sort.
It wouldn't be too hard to provide that kind of global update function, regardless of how you deal with each individual entry.