Author sort corruption?

[Hon]

Warning, I am a total newbie to Calibre, just getting started. This question may have been answered already, but I did not find it, quite possibly because I didn't use the proper search terms. In which case I'll plead guilty to stupidity, but still would appreciate some help

I sofar purchase all my books from Amazon, and import them into Calibre. Then I convert them to epub. All my Calibre settings are default, I merely change a few settings each time I do a conversion to epub (add empty line between paragraphs and set split size to 0). Note I have a plugin to 'liberate' my Amazon ebooks.

I recently purchased the French edition of the collected works of Jules Verne. At the same time I 'purchased' the PD (free) editon of the French edition of Around the world in 80 days. Both were converted to epub, where the completed works required 6 hours to do so.

Now I am trying to export these as a backup, through the save to disc function. The complete works get stuffed in a folder 'VerneJules' and the single book in 'Verne, Jules'. In addition to this, the title of the complete works also gets parts of words removed, replaced by a 0 or nothing.

When I look at the metadata, everything looks ok, and the author and author_sort fields of both books are identical. To make sure I deleted the author, selected in the dropdown list the author again, and save this. No change. I also opened the opf file of the completed works in Notepad++, and this looks ok to me (title, author are properly written).

So please tell me where I'm going wrong, and how to rectify this. Thanks!

Edit: I've been messing around with just about every setting (and restoring it after seeing it didn't help) and stumbled upon the template for saving to disc:
{author_sort}/{title}/{title} - {authors}
If I remove the - {authors} part, it works correctly.

Now, I would like to understand why, and why the default template has this problematic entry? Thanks!

[higgs]

I'm guessing it has something to do with the length of the filepath+ filename. With the authors at the end the length is too long and so gets truncated in places. With authors removed the length must be okay.
Someone with more technical experience may provide a more accurate answer :-)

Sent from my MotoG3 using Tapatalk

[Hon]

Thanks for the reply! I checked the total path length and came out 236 characters. So there really isn't a need to truncate yet, even though it comes close to the limit of Windows/ntfs 255 characters. I can understand a truncating mechanism may be present.

So I did a search here and found an old thread that states Calibre truncates at 36 characters (edit: per section, not the entire path naturally): http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/sh...d.php?t=220936

Is this still so in the current version? And if so, is this also true for Linux Calibre, since Linux has no such issues with their filesystems? I can always switch to Linux.

[theducks]

why do you need a title FOLDER

{author_sort}/{title}/{title} - {authors}

The rest make some sense (why the Juels Verne, when the book is in the Verne, Jules folder)

[Hon]

I don't. Now that I know how this works, I have replaced it with {series}

However, I'd still like to know how the truncating works (limits and Windows vs Linux) so I can take this into account in future.

[chaley]

Looking at calibre's code for save-to-disk, for windows the max allowed path length is 240. For linux it is 1000. In both cases calibre reserves 4 characters for the extension.

If a path is too long then (roughly) calibre shortens it by computing how many extra characters there are (X) and how many path segments there are (P), then removing X/P characters from the center of each path segment.

You can control truncation yourself using the formatter function shorten.

[Hon]

Thanks very much! That clears it up, I'll have a look at the formatter function to see if I can adapt it to my needs.