Help liberating documents from file structure

[edzard]

Hello!

I just bought a nook, and I wanted to load a bunch of policy documents onto it through calibre. These documents are stored in an elaborate file structure. Of course this failed, and after reading the sticky I understand why. After thinking about it for a while it makes sense to store documents this way, however I am still stuck with my 200+ policy documents that are stored in a file structure and do not have names from which you can usefully extract meta-data.

After reading up on the regexp stuff I found out that it is not possible to let callibre extract the metadata from the full path of a document either, just from the actual filename.

Since most people making the conversion have probably had the same problem as I have, does anyone know of easy-to-use freeware that lets you rename documents according to folder structure? For me it is not an option to manually rename them all, there are just too many of them.

Second question: is there an option in callibre to add custom metadata tags? The existing metadata tags are less relevant for policy documents than for books.

Thanks in advance!

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by edzard

Second question: is there an option in callibre to add custom metadata tags? The existing metadata tags are less relevant for policy documents than for books.

There are no metadata tags built into Calibre.

What tags you have is determined by a combination of thoses you add manually, and any that might be retrieved from metadata sources, or which are alraedy embedded in the ebook files.

Any tag can be edited/added/removed from within Calibre so it is up to you to decide what tags to have.

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by edzard

Second question: is there an option in callibre to add custom metadata tags? The existing metadata tags are less relevant for policy documents than for books.

Originally Posted by itimpi

There are no metadata tags built into Calibre.

What tags you have is determined by a combination of thoses you add manually, and any that might be retrieved from metadata sources, or which are alraedy embedded in the ebook files.

Any tag can be edited/added/removed from within Calibre so it is up to you to decide what tags to have.

I think the OP wants to be able to add custom fields which can hold values. edzard, if that is what you want, look up custom columns in the user guide. You might also find this tutorial on sub-groups useful, depending on exactly what you want to do.

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by edzard

Since most people making the conversion have probably had the same problem as I have, does anyone know of easy-to-use freeware that lets you rename documents according to folder structure? For me it is not an option to manually rename them all, there are just too many of them.

Try this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2576387/Flatten.hta

It's a HTA application that I knocked up while bored at work

Note that I haven't given it much testing, so make absolutely sure you have a backup before you use it.

To use:

Download it, double-click on it.
Enter the directory that has your files in the Source box
Enter the directory for them to be copied into in the Destination box
Click Flatten

Any colons or backslashes in the source file path will be converted into underscores, so for example:

C:\temp\foo\bar\foobar.txt
will become
C__temp_foo_bar_foobar.txt

[edzard]

I think the OP wants to be able to add custom fields which can hold values. edzard, if that is what you want, look up custom columns in the user guide. You might also find this tutorial on sub-groups useful, depending on exactly what you want to do.

Yes, this is exactly what I want to do. Thanks!

Try this:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2576387/Flatten.hta

It's a HTA application that I knocked up while bored at work

I'll check out your fix and report back

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by edzard

Since most people making the conversion have probably had the same problem as I have, does anyone know of easy-to-use freeware that lets you rename documents according to folder structure? For me it is not an option to manually rename them all, there are just too many of them.

Take a look here:

http://ebook.software.informer.com/d...-file-renamer/

[theducks]

Metamorphose works on Windows

[edzard]

Thanks for the help! The HTA programme worked just fine, and I managed to do what I needed using a combo of regexp and search and replace. I'm sure the file rename programmes starson and theducks pointed to would have been useful too, and I will keep them in mind for future use.

Best

[avantman42]

Originally Posted by edzard

Thanks for the help! The HTA programme worked just fine, and I managed to do what I needed using a combo of regexp and search and replace. I'm sure the file rename programmes starson and theducks pointed to would have been useful too, and I will keep them in mind for future use.

Happy to help. I don't need to write Windows scripts very often these days, but it's useful to keep my hand in occasionally

Did you manage to do what you needed with custom columns?

[edzard]

Yep, it works just fine. One last question. I've done a batch conversion of all my documents to epub, and there were 5 or so documents that it got stuck on during the process, and of which I had to stall the conversion process. Now I want to find those five documents, tweak with the conversion settings, and retry the conversion. Only, I cannot find those documents, because I do not know how to search on available file type. How can I find the documents that are only available in pdf, without clicking through every document I have and checking available format types in the side bar?

Thanks!

[speakingtohe]

if you click twice on epub in the tag browser (click formats first) or typing
not formats:"=EPUB"
into the search bar will show you any files not converted to epub

Helen

[edzard]

Thanks! I've been trying to convert the remaining documents but for some reason the programme keeps hanging during the conversion process. I have no idea how to troubleshoot the process. i attached one of the incriminating files, could someone have a look at what's going awry?

best,
Edzard

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by edzard

Thanks! I've been trying to convert the remaining documents but for some reason the programme keeps hanging during the conversion process. I have no idea how to troubleshoot the process. i attached one of the incriminating files, could someone have a look at what's going awry?

best,
Edzard

I downloaded your file. It hung up for me too, at the parsing content stage. I ran out of patience at the 15 minute mark where it was still at 1%. I was, however, able to successfully and quickly convert it with Mobipocket Creator (free, if you're not familiar with it). The tables pretty much fall apart and alot of the text came out red for some reason, but the footnotes in the resulting html are readable and everything else looked good to me. The HTML file is in a zip file below. I didn't make any changes after it was output by MpC. You can use Sigil to put the tables back in a more legible arrangement and fix the text color if needed or just import the HTML into calibre and convert there.

[edzard]

I was, however, able to successfully and quickly convert it with Mobipocket Creator (free, if you're not familiar with it).

I tried some online converters which didn't work, until I found out that they use callibre as back-end. So somehow I assumed there was only one conversion programme. The other files I couldn't convert with callibre are converted just fine using mobipocket. Problem solved!