Losing special characters when sending books via email

[FacetiousKnave]

My apologies in advance if this topic has already been discussed.

The problem:

As a Spanish speaker, a significant number of my books have special characters in their titles such as: ¿? and vowels with accents such as á, é, í, ó, ú.

When I add books with these special characters in their titles to my Calibre's library, they appear correctly in the list, but as soon as I email them to my Kindle, they lose all of them.

As I understand it, the reason this happens is that Calibre replaces the characters in the files saved in the library folder, so in order to preserve the characters, I have to edit the files externally and send them directly through my personal email. Characters are kept correctly by Amazon after the files are converted to whatever their native format is.

Suggestion:

Would it be possible for Calibre to save the files without altering the special characters, so that people can send their books internally?

[theducks]

Calibre ASCIIizes file names to avoid later issues with file handling by other parties/apps.
I don't believe this will change. Most modern reading apps use metadata, not file names. So the bookshelf on the device should be correct.

[FacetiousKnave]

Amazon is definitely reading the file name to generate the tittle, although it must be also reading the metadata to generate the author.

However, this is something relatively new, since it started happening after the last Kindle software update, Version 5.15.1 – September 2022

An example:

Title of the book (shown in Calibre): ¿Qué hora es?

Calibre renames the file as: _Que hora es_

The file lands on the Kindle with the file name instead of the title in the metadata.

Anyway, I know it is not up to me to decide what changes to make on Calibre, but I would just like to kindly suggest the developers to have a look into it whenever they have a chance, considering that this issue must be affecting all non-English readers who use Kindle devices.

[BetterRed]

FWIW: The ? character is not allowed in Windows file names, along with these: \ / : * " < > |. One way around that it to replace the ? with ？ U+FF1F (Full width question mark)

Then with these save settings



You'll get this when you do a save to disk

¿Qué hora es？ - Don Quixote.epub

I have no idea if that would work in Send by Mail to a Kindle.

BR

[FacetiousKnave]

Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately it did not work. I copied your settings, but Calibre stills replace the alternative question mark with an underscore symbol.

Just to clarify, I am able to manually include the special characters on the file name because I am using a mac. I forgot that you cannot do the same on Windows.

Anyway, I hope Amazon eventually decide to bring back things as they were before. Their unpractical decision to generate the title from the file name is making everything incredibly difficult.

EDIT: Sorry, you were right, I missed the "save to disk" step. In fact, I just tried with a title full of vowels with accents and it all work! Many thanks.

EDIT 2: Just out of curiosity, if Calibre is able to do that when you "save to disk", why cant it just save the files on the library with the special characters included?

[kovidgoyal]

You just have to wait for amazon to fix their software, if they ever will. In the meantime use a USB cable to send books to your kindle.

Filenames are ascii-ized for maximum *robustness*. In your case, aazon's email service has been known to reject email with non-ascii filenames. No one knows exactly what it doesnt like, so calibre errs on the side of safety and just ascii-zes it completely and removes any filename unsafe characters.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by FacetiousKnave

EDIT 2: Just out of curiosity, if Calibre is able to do that when you "save to disk", why cant it just save the files on the library with the special characters included?

First reason is cross platform compatibility. Not only does calibre run on multiple operating systems (Windows, MacOS and Linux), it can also be used on several file systems including: FAT32, NTFS, Ext 2, 3 & 4, HFS+, NFS, AFS…. Each platform has its own idiosyncrasies with respect to path, directory and file names. Rather than cater to each platform Kovid made the decision to adopt a lowest common denominator approach - 'normalise' them to ASCII, truncate, disallow some characters etc - the TINAW rule rules.

Second reason is that the author and book folders only exist because to put the format and cover files into the database as blobs (where a theoretical information purest would say they belong) would result in operations that use those files not only being painfully slow, but a lot more error prone.

I sometimes wonder if Kovid regrets not just having book directories with the database rowid as the name, with format files names as book.EPUB, book.PDF. book.MOBI etc. I think I would.

BR

[Quoth]

The purist approach might work with an SQL Server, not SQLite and would not work on FAT32. Last time I tried big binary blobs it resulted in excess RAM usage, poorer performance and a giant file, that was using MS SQL Server with NTFS.
So storing the files as-is in a directory structure is what I did. The current system aids human debugging and backups. Using the current naming allows human merging and also fixing/recovery of broken systems which the Row ID wouldn't.
I've seen backups on NTFS fail because the overall path was too long or a file name had accented characters.
So I think on balance Kovid made the right decision. Or whoever started the system for the Sony ereader; my understanding was that the embryonic library was taken over by Kovid when it only supported Sony?

Not quite related, but databases are not as simple as beginners think
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/ind...loits_of_a_Mom

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Or whoever started the system for the Sony ereader; my understanding was that the embryonic library was taken over by Kovid when it only supported Sony?

Nope calibre was originally libprs500 for the sony prs500, also developed by me. The calibre database is almost entirely my code. The other major contributor was chaley who added custom columns to it.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Nope calibre was originally libprs500 for the sony prs500, also developed by me. The calibre database is almost entirely my code.

Thanks. I knew it was for Sony first. Well, you have done a great job from the beginning and outlasted Sony ereaders!

[FacetiousKnave]

In the meantime use a USB cable to send books to your kindle.

Thanks for your response, but I think it would be more practical for me to take the approach of BetterRed, which is saving to disk the books I want to send by email, as they keep all the special characters except for "?". That way, setting Calibre to save the files without the name author, I can just attach them all in an email.