missing letters in library export?

[eschatology]

hi all,

i've just started using Calibre to manage a few books, but i'm having an odd issue with the export (‘Save to disc’) feature, in that it's dropping letters from the filename.

for example, i have an ebook (PDF) which shows in Calibre with the author “Lewis Call” (correct) and the title “Structures of desire: Postanarchist kink in the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany” (also correct) –*both the author and title were already correct in the PDF metadata so i didn't edit them.

but when i export this to disk, by selecting all books then ‘Save to disc’, Calibre puts it in a directory called “Calwis” with a filename of “Structures of desire_ Postanarchist kn of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.pdf”, neither of which are correct.

i have another book (also a PDF) with the title “Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader” and the author “Gustav Landauer & Gabriel Kuhn & Richard Day”, but Calibre exports this to “Landauer, Gustav & Kbriel & Day, Richard/Revolution and Other s_ A Political Reader.pdf”.

i didn't see any option in preferences that might cause this—am i missing something, or is this a bug, or something else?

in case it matters, i'm using Calibre 6.23.0 on macOS 13.4.1. (i had an older version of Calibre, but updated to see if it would fix this problem, which it didn't).

thanks!

[theducks]

You lost the Ligatures .
These are single characters (that represent nested thin characters
FFi, ll, Fi, to name a few

PDF is a page layout format that among other thing does typesetting tricks from the olde days.

PDF is a terrible format to convert from for this and many other reasons.

[DNSB]

Another possibility is that you are running into the limits that calibre sets for path lengths to maintain compatibility over multiple OS.

A quick test would be save into a directory with a shorter path or to the root of an external USB drive.

[eschatology]

thanks - i agree that PDF isn't a great format, but these are both texts formatted for printing with specific formatting i don't really want to lose. if the author and title are correct in Calibre, shouldn't they also be correct when exporting?

in the first case, the missing text from the title is the entire string “ink in the speculative fictio” which doesn't seem like it could be caused by just dropping ligatures.

Originally Posted by DNSB

A quick test would be save into a directory with a shorter path or to the root of an external USB drive.

interesting: i tried exporting to a directory with a shorter path and i ended up with “Call,Lewis” (correct except for missing the space) and “Structures of desire_ Postanarchist kink in the sative fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany” for the filename, which has removed fewer characters but is still wrong.

i know the filesystem will support the entire name, because i just renamed the exported file by hand without a problem.

is there perhaps a setting somewhere to increase the limit, if that's what the problem is?

[BetterRed]

The format of the book is irrelevant, the Save to Disk folder and file names are derived from the metadata in the database.

Calibre will shorten Save to Disk path lengths on all platforms (Operating System + File System). Do a search in this subforum for 'path length' and you'll find discussion on the issue.

I would strip the "Postanarchist kink in the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany" from the Title and put it in a Subtitle custom column and change the Save to Disk template accordingly.

BR