[Starson17]

Originally Posted by citac

thank you for the suggestion, I tried that but it doesn't recognize the series now.

You said your books were formatted as:

Series - number - Title.txt

If they are formatted that way, it will work. I just tested it on this:

Series - 5 - Book title.txt

and it worked correctly. Post a book that it doesn't work on and I'll explain why.

When I opened the Preferences dialog, I found this:

(?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)

That's the default.

I replaced it with this:

(?P<series>.+) - (?P<title>[^_]+)

Yours won't do the series number. Mine will (provided your books are named as you said they were.)

I'm using the portable version found on the PortableApps website, if that makes a difference.

That's going to be an older version, but it should still work.

How would I need to name a file for cases where I'd like to see the series index and author names, for book where I want that distinction?

See above. I gave you a very simple regular expression, as you seemed worried about complexity. Simple expressions are easy to understand, but aren't very flexible when it comes to variations in the filename. Search for "regular expression" or "regex" if you want a complex, but flexible expression.

Also, is there a way to minimize the number of folders/subfolders I get in the "Saving books" dialog?

Yes, see the next tab on the page that has the regex we're talking about,.

discovered that

(?P<series>[^_]+) (?P<series_index>[0-9]+) - (?P<title>.+) - (?P<author>[^_]+)

seems to work but only if I choose to have Calibre use file names as it's source of metadata.

That won't work with the way you said you named your files. There's no hyphen between the series and series number. You always have to have Calibre use file names as it's source of metadata for the regex to apply.

What will happen if I import a book which has metadata in the file? Will it be ignored?

Yes

Also, can I have a different scheme for files named in a different way? I have some files where author is listed first; will the file be read in the correct way?

It depends on your regex and how "different" the names are. You can make things optional (like your hyphen), but you can't make things optionally swap positions. I suggest you do some searching. There are lots of regexes available. If your files are named consistently, one of them will work.