Kobo plugboard setup?

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by isarl

You're still messing about with a regex that's way more complicated than you need. I have no interest in helping you debug a regex that I don't see as necessary, so unless you have more feedback about how my suggestion was insufficient for your needs, I will be bowing out from further help here.

I beg to differ. It's exactly as complicated as it needs to be to do the job I want it to do. Your suggestion was inadequate for the reasons I stated above.

My solution does what I want, it's fully debugged, and I don't need any help with that. There is no need for you to be offended simply because I choose to do things a different way to you. Maybe you're OK with having authors listed under "Jr" and "II" and "(ed.), but I'm not.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Phssthpok

I beg to differ. It's exactly as complicated as it needs to be to do the job I want it to do. Your suggestion was inadequate for the reasons I stated above.

My solution does what I want, it's fully debugged, and I don't need any help with that. There is no need for you to be offended simply because I choose to do things a different way to you. Maybe you're OK with having authors listed under "Jr" and "II" and "(ed.), but I'm not.

Electing not to invest further help in somebody who is perceived as not accepting my help is not taking offense, it's just making sensible use of my time. :P When I had replied beforehand, you had not yet illustrated the problems with those names with suffices. So likewise, there is no need for you to be offended simply because I was having trouble understanding where my previous suggestion failed to meet your needs. Your explanation was exactly what I was after; I can empathize with wanting author names parsed properly by your Kobo even though I don't yet have any Jr's or III's or similar names in my library.

If I test your proposed solution:

{author_sort:'re(list_re($, '&', '^([^,]*)(,(.*))?$', '\3 \1'),'&',', ')'}

with an author whose name is like, “Joe Schmoe, MD” and whose author_sort is set to “Schmoe, Joe, MD”, then it comes out as: “Joe, MD Schmoe”. While this looks odd I guess it will almost your needs since the last name should be detected properly. However it will still have a spurious comma in there, which will result in splitting your authors where you don't want it to (“Joe, MD Schmoe” will result in two authors: “Joe”, and “MD Schmoe”) – and I think I can help you with this. Simply add an extra re() call to replace commas with something that looks comma-like to you but is treated differently by the software – previously I had used @ as a placeholder, but now that I do a quick search, my first suggestion is Unicode codepoint 0x2e32, “TURNED COMMA”. Here is a turned comma and then a regular comma, for the sake of comparison:

⸲,

So my refinement to what you've arrived at (which I agree, seems to (very nearly!) capture your desired logic efficiently enough ) is the following:

{author_sort:'re(re(list_re($, '&', '^([^,]*)(,(.*))?$', '\3 \1'), ',', '⸲'),'&',', ')'}

For a book with authors like “Joe Schmoe, MD & Aesop” (where I have paid attention to tweak Joe's author_sort to be like “Schmoe, Joe, MD”), this template transforms them into: “Joe⸲ MD Schmoe, Aesop” (the first comma is that TURNED COMMA so your Kobo will detect this as two authors: “Joe⸲ MD Schmoe”, and “Aesop”). I've also tested the template on books with single authors and it works fine for them, as well. But I invite you to test it further, given the size of your collection. Edge cases love to sneak in.

Hope that helps more, and good luck!

[isarl]

PS: I also tested it on a book with an author like “Dr. First Last”. I believe Calibre has (some?) such titles built into its logic, so the author sort for this author was already set to “Last, First” without any intervention on my part and the template worked flawlessly. If you have an author like “Title First Last” and the author sort is not set correctly, you may run into issues. But of course I hope you expect to have “Garbage In, Garbage Out” if you know you're dealing with poorly-curated metadata.

PPS: I've also tested with authors with author_sort values like “Fitzgerald, F. Scott”, “Fonseca, Josa da”, “Le Guin, Ursula K.”, “López-Alt, J. Kenji”, and mononyms like “Aesop”; basically all the “strangest” examples I could find in my tag browser, and it seems to work for any and all of them, and for combinations thereof.

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by isarl

“Joe Schmoe, MD” and whose author_sort is set to “Schmoe, Joe, MD”, then it comes out as: “Joe, MD Schmoe”. While this looks odd I guess it will almost your needs since the last name should be detected properly.

Yes, but when I set the author_sort for "special" names like this I set it to "Schmoe, Joe MD" without the extra comma. Since this only affects how it is sorted, and not how it's displayed, it works fine.

Simply add an extra re() call to replace commas with something that looks comma-like to you but is treated differently by the software – previously I had used @ as a placeholder, but now that I do a quick search, my first suggestion is Unicode codepoint 0x2e32, “TURNED COMMA”. Here is a turned comma and then a regular comma, for the sake of comparison:

⸲,

That's a good idea. Not needed at the moment, but I'll bear it in mind.

So my refinement to what you've arrived at (which I agree, seems to (very nearly!) capture your desired logic efficiently enough ) is the following:

{author_sort:'re(re(list_re($, '&', '^([^,]*)(,(.*))?$', '\3 \1'), ',', '⸲'),'&',', ')'}

For a book with authors like “Joe Schmoe, MD & Aesop” (where I have paid attention to tweak Joe's author_sort to be like “Schmoe, Joe, MD”), this template transforms them into: “Joe⸲ MD Schmoe, Aesop” (the first comma is that TURNED COMMA so your Kobo will detect this as two authors: “Joe⸲ MD Schmoe”, and “Aesop”). I've also tested the template on books with single authors and it works fine for them, as well. But I invite you to test it further, given the size of your collection. Edge cases love to sneak in.

Hope that helps more, and good luck!

Thanks!

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by isarl

PS: I also tested it on a book with an author like “Dr. First Last”. I believe Calibre has (some?) such titles built into its logic, so the author sort for this author was already set to “Last, First” without any intervention on my part and the template worked flawlessly. If you have an author like “Title First Last” and the author sort is not set correctly, you may run into issues. But of course I hope you expect to have “Garbage In, Garbage Out” if you know you're dealing with poorly-curated metadata.

PPS: I've also tested with authors with author_sort values like “Fitzgerald, F. Scott”, “Fonseca, Josa da”, “Le Guin, Ursula K.”, “López-Alt, J. Kenji”, and mononyms like “Aesop”; basically all the “strangest” examples I could find in my tag browser, and it seems to work for any and all of them, and for combinations thereof.

"I always keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency," to quote Foghorn Leghorn, and I always check author_sort for any new authors.

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by Lys

If you don't want to set the reading %, but you just want to set books as "Finished", you just need to select the books, select the "update metadata on device" option, and then flag the set reading status as needed (see image).

Amazing. Select all rating=5 books in Calibre, click on KU, set reading status to finished, set the book filter on the Kobo to "unread", and the job is done. I now have close to 6000 books on the Kobo, all neatly arranged as I desire.

The only thing I'm missing now is a way to go to "authors beginning with M" in the author list, and the search doesn't seem to help much for that. Oh well.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Phssthpok

Amazing. Select all rating=5 books in Calibre, click on KU, set reading status to finished, set the book filter on the Kobo to "unread", and the job is done. I now have close to 6000 books on the Kobo, all neatly arranged as I desire.

The only thing I'm missing now is a way to go to "authors beginning with M" in the author list, and the search doesn't seem to help much for that. Oh well.

Awesome, happy to help and glad to hear it's working for you!

For “authors beginning with M”, I'm not sure whether you're talking about in Calibre or on the Kobo. In Calibre, you can right-click Authors in the tag browser, and choose “Change sub-categorization scheme” to “By first letter”. (If you have enabled the tweak to show author names as Last, First in the tag browser, then this will use the first letter of their last name – otherwise, of their first name.) If you are talking about on the Kobo, then in My Books -> Authors, you can choose to sort by First Name, Last Name, and other options as well (mononyms conveniently sort properly regardless of whether you are using First Name or Last Name). If it's just an issue that the list of authors is long, I don't know that you can jump directly to a letter, but you should be able to manipulate the scrollbar directly and jump down e.g. halfway through rather than having to page through authors one page at a time. Not sure if either of these addresses your need. Another way to address it might be the Calibre search query:

author_sort:="~^M"

which returns only books with an author whose author_sort field starts with M. Or if you wanted only books with an author whose surname (or mononym) starts with M or any following letter, you could use

author_sort:="~^[M-Z]

The tilde at the start of the search string indicates that it is a regular expression search.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Phssthpok

The only thing I'm missing now is a way to go to "authors beginning with M" in the author list, and the search doesn't seem to help much for that. Oh well.

Years back, I seem to remember one person who created collections based on the first letter of the primary author's last name. So a collection called M would have any author with that last name in it.

[Lys]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Years back, I seem to remember one person who created collections based on the first letter of the primary author's last name. So a collection called M would have any author with that last name in it.

I think it was @chaley, because I'm pretty sure I ran in his & davidfor examples and discussion on how to use the template functions to create collections.

Indeed, I remember correctly: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=347056
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=346321

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Lys

I think it was @chaley, because I'm pretty sure I ran in his & davidfor examples and discussion on how to use the template functions to create collections.

Indeed, I remember correctly: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=347056
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=346321

At a quick glance, the examples in these threads are trying to do a bit of extra stuff and so the author abbreviation gets lost in a bit of noise. Here's a template I just came up with which seems to work:

program:
  result = '';
  for a in 'author_sort' separator '&':
    result = list_join(', ', result, ',', substr(a, 0, 1), ',')
  rof

The for loop's value is the value of the last top expression in it, which for an assignment is the assigned value, in this case the final value of result. This will not return a value with a spurious comma at the end of the list, which I was getting when trying something similar using strcat().

[Phssthpok]

Originally Posted by isarl

For “authors beginning with M”, I'm not sure whether you're talking about in Calibre or on the Kobo.

The Kobo -- I know how to do it on Calibre. But I have about 800 authors, and paging through them is a pain if I can't remember the exact name. I suppose I can look the name up on Calibre (if I'm next to my computer) and then use the Kobo search. Can't expect the Kobo to do everythng, I suppose (unlike Calibre, which already does do everything!).

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Phssthpok

The Kobo -- I know how to do it on Calibre. But I have about 800 authors, and paging through them is a pain if I can't remember the exact name. I suppose I can look the name up on Calibre (if I'm next to my computer) and then use the Kobo search. Can't expect the Kobo to do everythng, I suppose (unlike Calibre, which already does do everything!).

Try the template I shared in my most recent comment in the thread before this one. The KoboTouch drivers have a field where you can supply a template to calculate collections.