Author sort for compound surnames?

[Uncle Robin]

I bought Shirley van Pelt's book "Remarkably Bright Creatures" today, and Calibre sorts her name as "Pelt, Shirley van" For family names/surnames with compound elements (van, van de, van den, von, de de la, da, Te, etc. etc. etc.), how do I instruct Calibre that the compound element, often with a lowercase initial letter, is part of the family name, not a secondary given name?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

I bought Shirley van Pelt's book "Remarkably Bright Creatures" today, and Calibre sorts her name as "Pelt, Shirley van" For family names/surnames with compound elements (van, van de, van den, von, de de la, da, Te, etc. etc. etc.), how do I instruct Calibre that the compound element, often with a lowercase initial letter, is part of the family name, not a secondary given name?

There are two ways to change it for a single author:

• In the tag browser, right-click on the author, chose Edit sort, and type in what you want.
• In the tag browser, right click on any author, choose Manage authors, then change as many as you want. (NB: this fails in calibre 6.0, works in calibre 6.1.

All the books will be updated with the change.

If you want to tell calibre to try to do it when a new book is imported, go to Preferences / Tweaks. Search for author_use_surname_prefixes. Set that tweak to True. Make sure that the author_surname_prefixes list immediately below has the prefixes you want to use. Changing the tweak does not change any existing author.

[BetterRed]

@chaley - not convinced the Tweak is working when a book is added (but I might have missed/forgotten something), following is a composite image of the Book List, Tweak (copy method is 'invert'), and Manage Authors list:



Note: 'van' is in the default list of surname prefixes, and I've added 'St.'

The following are: a) changing the Author Sorts to what I would have expected them to be, and b) the Book list after resorting



The edit pencil in Manage Authors needs to lighten up a bit

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@chaley - not convinced the Tweak is working when a book is added (but I might have missed/forgotten something), following is a composite image of the Book List, Tweak (copy method is 'invert'), and Manage Authors list:

You missed something.

You must set the boolean author_use_surname_prefixes to True. It is immediately above the list of prefixes.

I set the tweaks to:

author_use_surname_prefixes = True
author_surname_prefixes = ('da', 'de', 'di', 'la', 'le', 'van', 'von', 'St.')

I tried it by adding the book file Some Title - Madeleine St. John.epub.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The edit pencil in Manage Authors needs to lighten up a bit
BR

Not for me. This might be yet another instance of the theming problem you have been discussing in the "Issues..." thread. Or the theme you are using is wrong.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

You missed something.

You must set the boolean author_use_surname_prefixes to True. It is immediately above the list of prefixes.

I set the tweaks to:

author_use_surname_prefixes = True
author_surname_prefixes = ('da', 'de', 'di', 'la', 'le', 'van', 'von', 'St.')

I tried it by adding the book file Some Title - Madeleine St. John.epub.

As I suspected, the bleedin' obvious hiding in plain sight.

It must have been on at one stage because I have all of St. John's books - she was a close friend of an ex.

The pen hiding in the shadows comment was as much a note to self to find something better as it was to thee.

BR

[BetterRed]

I fixed my Manage Authors modified.png icon problem. I know what I did, which was to follow my intuition, but I don't know why it worked - especially the third step. The icon displayed was a dark ballpoint pen on a dark ground, which was hard to see. Now its white quill on a dark ground.

• First I copied modified-for-dark-theme.png and modified-for-light-theme.png from the install->resources\images folder to the config->resources\images folder.
  
  That didn't fix my problem - still had a dark ball point pen.
  
• So I renamed modified.png in my config->resources\images\ folder to modified-not.png.
  
  That didn't fix my problem - still had a dark ball point pen.
  
• So I renamed config->icons-any.rcc to config->icons-any.rcc.save
  
  That seems to have fixed my problem - I now have a white quill modified icon, and I've kept my old icons.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

[...]
That seems to have fixed my problem - I now have a white quill modified icon, and I've kept my old icons.
BR

Does the icon change when you change between dark and light?

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

Does the icon change when you change between dark and light?

Yep

BR