Creating Catalogs (Archived)

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom

I didn't add any books with Sex in the title, and did a search, and found nothing. Are you sure there isn't some kind of censorship going on?

You can't censor something that you say isn't there.

I had the same error you had except the word was Catch.

ValueError: invalid literal for float(): Catch

When I reviewed my titles I had a book titled Catch-22. On a hunch I removed the - and renamed the title Catch 22. This corrected my problem and is the reason I made the suggestion. If you can't find a title with Sex in the title then just wait until 0.6.38 comes out and try again.

[GRiker]

New/improved Catalog Features in 0.6.38:

• Series information displayed for cataloged titles.
  
• Multiple sorting bugs resolved. Problems involving numbers in titles should be history.
  
• 'Titles' and 'Recently Added' Sections are now optional. 'Genres' Section may be excluded by using '.' (a single period, no quotes) in the 'exclude as genres' regex specified in the E-book options tab of the Catalog dialog. A minimal catalog now includes Descriptions and Authors, with Titles and Recently Added optional, and Genres optionally added depending upon the regex and the tags assigned to your books.
  
• Thumbnail rendering tweaked for EPUB catalogs.
  
• Simple markup now supported in comments field. You may markup comments with the following tags:
  

  <b>Bold text</b>
  <i>Italic text</i>
  <br /> (line break)
  <p>A paragraph, which may contain <b>,<i> and <br /> tags.</p>

  Two consecutive line feeds will cause a new paragraph in the comments. For example:
  
  

  This is a paragraph with some descriptive comments.
  
  This is a second paragraph with some more descriptive comments.

  will be rendered as two separate paragraphs in comments section of the Description page, just like it looks in the Edit Meta Information comments field.

G

[Sydney's Mom]

Originally Posted by GRiker

Definitely no censorship.

G

By the way, I tried it again last night, and it worked with 6.37. Computers - gotta love em.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom

By the way, I tried it again last night, and it worked with 6.37. Computers - gotta love em.

Computers are like Cats...
No two are (close to being) the same,
Even if they are from the same litter


OH!
And the other similarity is ...
Getting them to do what you want

[Mitchll]

Running Mac OS X, with new 6.38 I am getting an error message:

Spoiler:

Generate catalog
Python function terminated unexpectedly: object of type 'NoneType' has no len()
Catalog_EPUB_MOBI(): Generating epub for sony900 in GUI environment
Book count: 7757
Creating Sections for Descriptions, Authors, Titles, Recently Added, Genres
opts:
catalog_title: My Books Feb 9 10
exclude_genre: \[[\w ]*\]
exclude_tags: ~
note_tag: *
numbers_as_text: False
read_tag: +
search_text: None
sort_by: None
sort_descriptions_by_author: True
sync: False
Begin catalog source generation
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Resources/Python/lib/python2.6/site.py", line 147, in main
return run_entry_point()
File "/Applications/calibre.app/Contents/Resources/Python/lib/python2.6/site.py", line 116, in run_entry_point
return getattr(pmod, func)()
File "site-packages/calibre/utils/ipc/worker.py", line 99, in main
File "site-packages/calibre/gui2/convert/gui_conversion.py", line 62, in gui_catalog
File "site-packages/calibre/library/catalog.py", line 3141, in run
File "site-packages/calibre/library/catalog.py", line 823, in buildSources
File "site-packages/calibre/library/catalog.py", line 935, in fetchBooksByTitle
TypeError: object of type 'NoneType' has no len()

What do I need to do to clear it up?

Thanks

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by Mitchll

Running Mac OS X, with new 6.38 I am getting an error message:

What do I need to do to clear it up?

Thanks

It looks like you may have some books without authors. Try searching for author:false or sorting by author to see if you can spot them, try adding an author, let me know what happens.

I'll put a test in for this condition in the next release.

G

[Mitchll]

Originally Posted by GRiker

It looks like you may have some books without authors. Try searching for author:false or sorting by author to see if you can spot them, try adding an author, let me know what happens.

I'll put a test in for this condition in the next release.

G

Success! The problem is in the "author sort" metadata; a blank there stopped the process even though author field was complete.

[GRiker]

Originally Posted by Mitchll

Success! The problem is in the "author sort" metadata; a blank there stopped the process even though author field was complete.

Thanks, I'll fix that in the next release (0.6.40)

G

[alecE]

Finally caught up with version 0.6.39 (work is the curse of the reading classes). Really impressed with the handling of series data now.
The time taken to generate the catalogue seems to have improved as well - running Win XP Pro SP3, took 4 min 7 sec to generate the catalogue for 300 titles.

Absolutely ace

[GRiker]

Just a few adjustments and robustness tweaks in this update:

• Books sorted by author are now grouped into non-series books, then series books, with a break separating them. This change is visible in the Author, Genre, and Recently Added Sections.
• Improvement to thumbnail rendering based on output profile.
• Improved error handling for missing or malformed metadata.

G

[HarryO53]

Maybe I'm missing something here. I create a catalog with, say, EPUB books. I then go to my trusty iPod and try to transfer books from that catalog. The only thing that is transferred is the catalog I just created, the list. None of the books within that catalog are listed for download.

?

[lisa.m]

Harry, I believe the catalog is just that, a catalog. It does not contain the actual books, just the descriptions of the books. You still need to transfer the books manually to your device.

The catalog is great because it allows you to read all of the book descriptions, look up which book comes next in a series, etc. It is a reference guide.

[HarryO53]

Originally Posted by lisa.m

Harry, I believe the catalog is just that, a catalog. It does not contain the actual books, just the descriptions of the books. You still need to transfer the books manually to your device.

The catalog is great because it allows you to read all of the book descriptions, look up which book comes next in a series, etc. It is a reference guide.

OIC. Tis a pain in the neck to have to weed through all of my file formats to transfer books over to Stanza. Thought this would help. Stanza shows every format and book in the library. The download button does not show up unless the format is EPUB. I wind up having to scroll through my library and download books whenever Stanza sees the right format and presents a download button on my iPod.

[banjomike]

I'm confused.

If I'm looking through the catalog under Titles (created with 0.6.40) for "Murder on the Orient Express" I have to look under "P" because the titles are listed with my series in front. Is that right?

[GRiker]

@banjomike:
If a book is part of a series, the title is rendered as <series> <series index>: <title>.

So, if title = Murder on the Orient Express and
series = Hercule Poirot Mysteries and
series index = 10, the title will be listed and sorted as:
Hercule Poirot Mysteries 10: Murder on the Orient Express

G