[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

[michalc]

plugin installed and visible in the list, but i can't see "collections" icon on the toolbar (plugin 1.4.3, calibre 0.7.49, windows xp). what can be wrong?

[meme]

Calibre should have prompted you to add the plugin to the "main toolbar when a device is connected". The icon will only be visible if you connect a device (a Kindle preferably ) to your PC.

If you have the device connected and there is still no icon, you can add it manually by going to Preferences->Customize toolbar, then from the drop down menu select "the main toolbar when a device is connected", select the Kindle Collections entry on the left, then click the right arrow button to add it to the toolbar, and save.

[shapeshifter]

Thanks for this great plugin!

[jesscat]

Originally Posted by meme

@jesscat - No idea. What OS are you running? Does the plugin take a long time to run? And is the dialog really gone - not hidden behind Same thing after a reboot? If you run Preview again does it always minimize or only some times?

I'm running Windows XP. The plugin sometimes takes about 30 seconds to a minute; I have about 1600 books. (Is that an abnormally long amount of time?) And sometimes Calibre doesn't minimize - I haven't been able to detect any pattern to when it does or doesn't. It is certainly possible this could be a Windows issue, with my system.

I've assumed the dalog is really gone - what does "hidden behind Same thing after a reboot" mean?

[Vectorer]

this may have been answered before but i'm too lazy to read 31 pages!

is there a way to do collections alphabetically by author? i.e. only 26 collections (english) under headings A, B, C,..... etc.

many thanks in advance

[NiLuJe]

@Vectorer:

Yup, collection by Authors with:

rename_from:
^(\w*\.?\s*&?)*?(\w)(\w*)$
rename_to:
\2

Should do the trick . (It might not be perfect, most notably with multiple authors. Might have been easier to do it from Author Sort, but, oh, well. ).

[meme]

Yeah, slightly easier with Author Sort:

rename_from: ^(.).*$
rename_to: \1

Assuming all your last names start with either an uppercase or lowercase character (if you mix case you'll get two collections for the same letter).

And if you wanted to get fancier you can create a custom column in Calibre.

Added this to the Common Setups on the first post.

[Vectorer]

@meme @NiLuJe

thanks both. don't think i'll get fancier yet!

[jay2222]

Originally Posted by meme

Can you give an example of a few books and how you would want them collected?

Sure. When browsing the WEB I often save articles with ReaditLater. I then edit the title of the saved article by adding "homemade tags" to it like, for example, "tgSki" or "tgSkate" where the "tg" is attached to a word to differentiate it as a tag.

I would love to be able to create Collections from these homemade tags. For example, I could have a collection of all articles that have the word "tgSki" in its title. And the same article could be viewed in other collections if it has other "tgSomething" added to its title.

Would the this plugin allow me to do this? Basically, it is about being able to create Collections from words / text strings found in the title.

Thanks for helping me "get organized"!

[meme]

Originally Posted by jesscat

I'm running Windows XP. The plugin sometimes takes about 30 seconds to a minute; I have about 1600 books. (Is that an abnormally long amount of time?) And sometimes Calibre doesn't minimize - I haven't been able to detect any pattern to when it does or doesn't. It is certainly possible this could be a Windows issue, with my system.

I've assumed the dalog is really gone - what does "hidden behind Same thing after a reboot" mean?

The run time seems ok.

By hidden, I was wondering if the dialog window was behind any of the other windows. But I believe the dialog is always forced to be on top if you un-minimize Calibre's window, so maybe it really is closing. I also wondered if a reboot changed anything. I don't know the possible cause and it hasn't been reported by anyone else, but if anyone has any suggestions...

[meme]

Originally Posted by jay2222

I would love to be able to create Collections from these homemade tags.

Would the this plugin allow me to do this? Basically, it is about being able to create Collections from words / text strings found in the title.

Title isn't one of the columns you can manipulate in the plugin, but I can easily add it. With the rename facility there now, and the A-Z author, might as well support an A-Z title.

But for your documents - are you importing them into Calibre?

If you are, then it would make a lot more sense to use Calibre's tags to organize your documents. Just import them and add the appropriate tags to each document (to help, you can use the search facility once they are in Calibre to find documents with the same tgwords in the title).

If you don't want to do that for some reason, then if I add title to the customize list you could probably write a rename pattern (something like "^(tg([^ ]*) " to "\1") if the tag was at the start and there was only one tag per title (but you've said you want multiple tags which isn't possible). However, using Calibre's tags would be much better.

If you aren't using Calibre, then this Calibre plugin won't be of much help Its designed to create collections from the info stored in Calibre. And anyone using collections probably has enough books to benefit from using Calibre as well.

You can use the plugin to manually create collections on the Kindle and add books to them that are only on the Kindle using the Edit Collections feature (but you still need Calibre to run the plugin). That would be a bit slow for a lot of books but is certainly possible.

[jay2222]

Re-tagging
That is what I was hoping not to have to do: retagging the docs once they are in Calibre. Since I tag them "on the fly" when I save them from the browser, I was hoping for the plugin to read those tags from the titles automatically and class the docs in the appropriate Collections.

About multiple tags = multiple Collections
I am from being into coding... But I thought that Collections were different "Views" of (in some cases) the same document. This is why I label them with multiple tags. For example, one document could be used as a reference on 2 different projects. Each project has its own tag. The document's title is appended with both tags. The same document appears in Collections assigned to different project.

"Multiple" thanks for giving attention to my inquiry !

[meme]

Originally Posted by jay2222

I was hoping for the plugin to read those tags from the titles automatically and class the docs in the appropriate Collections.

Well, that's something more for Calibre to do. The plugin is just meant to convert the Calibre information into collections, with some additional abilities for convenience.

One possible way to do this 'automatically' in Calibre is to use the custom column ability to create columns based on the title for your tag. Now this may not be the best way to do it, but you could do a simple approach of creating 1 custom column per tag (using the 'based on other columns' option), and in each of the template fields put something like: {title:contains(tgSki,Ski,)} This will put the word Ski in the column if the book's title contains tgSki, otherwise it will be blank. You'd have to create one custom column per tag. Then use the plugin and select 'Create' for those columns, and the collection 'Ski' will be created with those books.

It'd be nicer to have multiple tags in one column. The template can do it, but the problem is that the result is seen as a single text string and not a list of tags. So the plug only sees, for example "Ski,Other,Tag" as one word instead of 3 tags - not what is needed.

There doesn't seem to be a drop down option in create custom columns to create a column based on other columns but treat the result like a list of tags.

I am from being into coding... But I thought that Collections were different "Views" of (in some cases) the same document. This is why I label them with multiple tags.

Absolutely. I just said that the plugin couldn't handle multiple tags for one entry using the rename fields. The rename is a simple from one name to one other name and isn't meant to create multiple tags.

[jay2222]

Thank you very much for your suggestion about how to go about using a combination of Calilbre capabilities and your plugin to handle my way of organizing my documents. It will be a bit more work that anticipated but it seems that the end result will be as I wished it were.

Thanks again for such a great initiative on your part with this plugin.

[hrynkiw]

I'm pleased to report that I installed and applied this plugin without any problems whatsoever. I even slightly modified some of the criteria.

But now I need to go and re-tag all my books...

Thank-you!