[dailyalice]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

It looks like you understand correctly to me.

Hooray! (And thank you letting me know.)

FYI, even if you disable columns in Edit Metadata under Preferences / Look & feel / Edit Metadata, you can still edit those columns from the library book list just by double clicking when the columns are shown. So it's definitely 'hiding', not 'protecting'.

Ah, this is good to know. I think the actual first thing I suggest in my guide (after column creation) is to return to the place where you add columns and remove the checkmarks from next to the new special columns so they don't show up in column view (what you call library book list I guess I've been calling "column view").

I still recommend leaving the Saved Meta column interpreted as Text to be a little bit safer.

Calibre changing the HTML in long texts automagically came along after the FFF Saved Metadata Column feature. I would not have used an HTML format when the feature was implemented if I had known that was coming.

That makes sense. And yeah, I guess you can't change it now given how many people have used Saved Metadata and still use it from old books/libraries, etc.

I do mention your recommendation in the guide and explain, so hopefully I won't steer anyone too far afield. I strongly urge that people leave that data alone, but I also find it useful to have folks look at Saved Metadata (in Book Details) so they can see what data FanFicFare is actually pulling down and then decide which bits they might want in their own columns.

I suppose once I get my library settings the way I want, I don't necessarily need to look at Saved Metadata myself very often, it's just when I'm messing around with replace_metadata and so on that i find it helpful.

I've been using "HTML" for my long text columns where I write up my own comments on works, but I think I'm going to switch to plain text or text with Markdown because the HTML editor window in Edit Metadata seems to always throw empty paragraph HTML between my paragraphs, which puts a whole lot of extra space between paragraphs and looks awful when viewed in Book Details. (Or maybe if I stick with HTML I should just write my comments in the "HTML Source" tab rather than "Normal view" since I'm used to typing things in HTML anyway and then presumably I wouldn't be surprised when calibre tries to help by throwing in extra paragraph HTML.)