custom columns from only certain tags

[areyou]

Hi everyone,

I need some help with making a specific custom column that I just can not wrap my head around.

I have all my tags organised with various prefixes that make it easier to browse on my e reader, for example 'genre:', 'series:' and 'fandom:'.

However, in calibre, the 'Tags' column is very cluttered. What I would like is to have a few columns made up of just the tags that begin with one of these prefixes (or a custom column made up of only the tags in a particular user category).

Is this impossible? Is this insanely easy and I am completely missing something obvious?

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated!

[speakingtohe]

If the tags are in the form Genre.Mystery, for example, you could enable hierarchial items under preferences>look and Feel>Tag Browser.
Then it would be fairly easy to populate a custom column by selecting each genre in the tag browser and using bulk edit metadata.

For series, you can either use the tag browser to browse series or sort by series in the GUI although I would think the series column itself is pretty good already. (maybe I am misunderstanding the issue)

Helen

[chaley]

Originally Posted by areyou

Hi everyone,

I need some help with making a specific custom column that I just can not wrap my head around.

I have all my tags organised with various prefixes that make it easier to browse on my e reader, for example 'genre:', 'series:' and 'fandom:'.

However, in calibre, the 'Tags' column is very cluttered. What I would like is to have a few columns made up of just the tags that begin with one of these prefixes (or a custom column made up of only the tags in a particular user category).

Is this impossible? Is this insanely easy and I am completely missing something obvious?

Any help you can give me would be much appreciated!

It isn't clear what you want to do.

If you want to leave the items as tags but have subsets of them show up in another column as well, then this thread might help. Note that doing it this way can be very complicated and can be slow if your library is large (10,000 books or so).

If you want to have a column per prefix, then use a text (probably not tags-like) custom column. I don't recommend this unless your categorization scheme is well developed and doesn't change.

If you want to have a subset of the tags in another column and have a hierarchy, then speakingtohe's solution is the best. Create a tags-like text custom column, then enter the items you want. Use a period instead of the colon, as in genre.xxx or fandom.yyy. To see the column as a hierarchy you must go to Preferences -> look & feel -> tag browser and enter the column lookup name in the "Categories with hierarchical items" box.

For a discussion of hierarchical items such as genre, see Managing subgroups of books, for example “genre” in calibre's documentation.

I am not sure why you are putting series as a tag given that there is a series column, but that is another issue.