[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[dailyalice]

Originally Posted by dailyalice

Thanks!
I think the other method I tried last night didn't use a composite column at all, I just edited the custom columns in my personal.ini so all the different AO3 columns were sending data to my #series_ao3 column, like this:

add_to_custom_columns_settings:
 series00=>#series_ao3,a
 series01=>#series_ao3,a
 series02=>#series_ao3,a

Yeah, I just tried that method again and got similar results (see attachment).

Well, that was silly. I removed ",a" from all of those and that fixed the one problem. (I don't usually use ,a but I had copied this idea from someone earlier in this thread and they used it.)

But now I'm perplexed by what is happening with my "we miss being ruffians" series data. I have both an anthology (marked 0 in the series) and three works in the series (marked 1, 2, 3).

But this is how things look in the tag browser for my series. It shows just 1 work under "Series 1" but all four of them under my AO3 Series column.

This isn't actually a problem for me given I intend to hide the Series 1, Series 2, Series 3 categories in the tag browser and just keep calibre's default series category/column and my AO3 series column.

But it's weird, isn't it? See attached.

[dailyalice]

Ugh, I need to relearn how best to post and edit posts here. It has been years.

Also my guide to FanFicFare & calibre is at 275 pages (by some measure) in a Google doc. Even considering the zillion screenshots that's ridiculous and I'm a bit loopy from working on it. (And can't believe I've spent so much time on this particular issue.)

Anyway. I finally thought to check what calibre's default series category shows. It has all four works in the "we miss being ruffians" series.

I've tried so many different things I fear I'm getting them confused. If the main series is correct & my "all AO3 series" column/category is correct, that's fine.

[EDITED TO ADD: ]
And I'm not thinking clearly. The "Series 1" and "Series 2" columns are leftover from when I was sending things into individual series columns, but now I have things in personal.ini so they all go to one column and those old Series 1 and Series 2 columns aren't being updated. (And I should delete them if I'm just going to do it this way. I left them because I was still testing things out and thought I might still want them. Ugh.)

Ugh! Sorry for wasting anyone's time here.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by dailyalice

I think the other method I tried last night didn't use a composite column at all, I just edited the custom columns in my personal.ini so all the different AO3 columns were sending data to my #series_ao3 column, like this:

add_to_custom_columns_settings:
 series00=>#series_ao3,a
 series01=>#series_ao3,a
 series02=>#series_ao3,a

FYI, I don't use the tag browser at all, so I don't know what your images of it are meant to show. Assuming that is the tag browser.

I assume that the issue you got with the settings above was that it keeps growing on each update?

Try changing the ',a' flag to ',r' on the first list--that will overwrite the existing value, then the later lines will add to it.

If you posted any story URLs to go with this, I missed it.

[JimmXinu]

Anybody read storiesonline / finestories / scifistories ? (warning--generally NSFW content)

There's a github issue from a user who thinks it's imperative that story URLs for those sites be changed to include the story-title-in-url due to re-use of story ID numbers by the site. The site now fails with 'story not found' if the story-title-in-url is wrong, but not if it's absent.

Changing the 'canoncal' story URL scheme for a site can cause problems with matching existing stories, but the Search by Title/Author(s) for If Story Already Exists? helps a lot with that.

Opinions?

[Atherton25]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Anybody read storiesonline / finestories / scifistories ?
...

Opinions?

I remember this being brought up in the past. I've gotten a few stories from those sites, not a huge quantity, but I have had a couple that were deleted and when trying to download a new story were had conflicts due to ID reuse.. It is annoying when that happened, but I just turned the URL off and marked the story as deleted so that FFF couldn't do a normal update. If it's happening that frequently I could see it being more annoying.

I will point out that forcing an update should never be done unless it's prechecked. I generally just remove story URL and download a new one and if need to remove the old one. Books, particularly downloaded ones dont exactly take a lot of space and I have more than a few old versions from web novels.

I don't think I get enough from there to offer the best opinion, but generally there are lots of issues that crop up in other sites too, like Chapters being deleted and having to remove a story from updates and redownload, particularly on web novel sites like RoyalRoad and ScribbleHub. It's a process that just has to be adjusted to.

While it'd be nice to have something that just works, things don't always just work and if it's a lot of work *shrug* then it might not be worth the time to fix. Now, if it's a simple fix or something that can have a patch job done but old stuff still screws up, then newer downloaded stuff works right maybe that's the way to do it. But you're probably going to have complainers or run into other issues now matter which way it goes.

[riothamus]

I know this isn't strictly a FFF question, but you all are interested in downloading fanfiction so I'd like to ask a question...

For those methods that do still work with ff.net, has anyone been able to convert/format that file to match what the output from FFF looks like? For instance, I tried to run a FFDL file through Calibre conversion to the same format as my FFF output but no go, it looked smaller and different. I know there are some other methods like FF2eboook or extensions that can still get stories from ff.net. My OCD wants all my fanfics to look the same on my Kindle... Weird because when I read print books more regularly they were often very different...

If anyone has suggestions, please PM me. Mods, my apologies if this is against the thread rules. Feel free to delete and I won't post off-topic again.

Thanks!
Riothamus

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by riothamus

I know this isn't strictly a FFF question, but you all are interested in downloading fanfiction so I'd like to ask a question...

For those methods that do still work with ff.net, has anyone been able to convert/format that file to match what the output from FFF looks like? For instance, I tried to run a FFDL file through Calibre conversion to the same format as my FFF output but no go, it looked smaller and different. I know there are some other methods like FF2eboook or extensions that can still get stories from ff.net. My OCD wants all my fanfics to look the same on my Kindle... Weird because when I read print books more regularly they were often very different...

If anyone has suggestions, please PM me. Mods, my apologies if this is against the thread rules. Feel free to delete and I won't post off-topic again.

Thanks!
Riothamus

Here's one thing I've done in the past, to get a fanfic that had been deleted but was available via Wayback:

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

yeah, actually supporting wayback would be problematic -- not all chapters get archived, or old versions of the site.

What I've decided to do is make a copy of a different 15-chapter fanfic and swap out the info and content. This will preserve the FFF structure as well as possible.

So a question: In the ebook file itself, aside from the title page, file0000.xhtmls, and content.opf, are there any other places where there are traces of the 'donor' fic that I need to replace?

It's... tedious, though.

EDIT: I do wonder if perhaps the test site function could be used to generate empty ePub structures ready to accept copied content.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by riothamus

For those methods that do still work with ff.net, has anyone been able to convert/format that file to match what the output from FFF looks like?

Let's not have a big discussion of this here.

But I will say that you probably want to copy the CSS from a FFF download epub to get a more similar appearance.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2022-09-10
- storiesonline / finestories / scifistories : Change story URL scheme to keep story-title & use to detect story ID reuse. #882

See issue #882:

Changing the story URL schemes for storiesonline.net / finestories.com / scifistories.com like this, they will not match existing stories in plugin users' libraries by identifier:url.

With the Search by Title/Author(s) for If Story Already Exists? feature enabled, this should (hopefully) not be hugely painful, but it's worth noting for the users who don't keep that feature on.

[dailyalice]

In the guide to FanFicFare I'm working on, I tell people to make the Saved Metadata custom column a long text column (of course), but I've been suggesting they interpret the column as HTML, with a caution to not ever edit the data in that field (including instruction on how to remove it from Edit Metadata so they don't edit it by accident and/or aren't tempted to edit it).

Is there any reason it would be better to have folks make it a text column instead of HTML? I think HTML looks nicer and figure it's fine if you don't edit Saved Metadata, but wanted to be sure to get this right (as I feel the Saved Metadata column is literally the most important custom column you set up when first setting up calibre with FanFicFare). I think I saw something in the documentation that now suggested text is better (I thought I read HTML was better at some point, but I could be misremembering).

While I'm on the topic of Saved Metadata, I wanted to confirm that it can't be used for anthologies. I've been doing a lot of updates of works in my guide/test library from Saved Metadata as I document things and it definitely seems like Saved Metadata can't be used for anthologies (and that totally makes sense given how anthologies are created), but I wanted to be sure.

[JimmXinu]

If you edit a long text(html) column, even accidentally, Calibre "helps" with the HTML and breaks it as far as FFF is concerned.

That's why I recommend long text(plain text).

Users can choose to use long text(html) instead, but I'm not going to support it and don't recommend it.

Saved Metadata is not used by Anthology books.

[dailyalice]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

If you edit a long text(html) column, even accidentally, Calibre "helps" with the HTML and breaks it as far as FFF is concerned.

That's why I recommend long text(plain text).

Users can choose to use long text(html) instead, but I'm not going to support it and don't recommend it.

Saved Metadata is not used by Anthology books.

Thanks! That was my understanding, but I wanted to be sure.

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2022-09-11
- adapter_storiesonlinenet: Fix for premium accounts redirecting to directly chapter? #882
- adapter_storiesonlinenet: More tweaks to keep story-title in URL. #882
- Add flaresolverr_proxy_timeout (default 60000ms) #703

[DandalfTheWhite]

Hey there! This might be a unique to me problem, but I follow a series of oneshots, which is quite long now. The author has a lot of text and line breaks in the 'comments' area of the series. This makes the window that pops up when I try to update the anthology go off the screen. I am not able to hit the okay button without changing my screen's aspect ratio. Here is a screenshot of what it happening for me. The link to the series in question is here. Sorry if this has been reported already, it's not a big deal to manage, but wanted to send it your way. Thanks!

[JimmXinu]

That's already been made scrollable in the current test version.

Will be in the next release, or you can use the test version. Link in my .sig