Sorting authors with "et al."

[Rubikscube]

I have a bunch of papers which I want to add to my Calibre library. Many of these papers have multiple authors and are labeled "scholar et al.". When I try to edit metadata manually, Calibre seems to understand that "et al." is not part of the name, and suggests to author sort as "Scholar". However, Calibre will still sort the paper as "al. scholar et" unless I edit the author sort of every file manually.

I have a feeling I'm missing something really simple, but the best solution I can come up with is to tweak the author sort algorithm to include "al." as a copyword ("et al." does not work), which is ok most of the time, but not always. How can I make calibre automatically ignore "et al." when sorting authors?

[theducks]

You can also 'Manage Authors' in the Tag browser to do a 1 off (per author) sort value

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Rubikscube

I have a bunch of papers which I want to add to my Calibre library. Many of these papers have multiple authors and are labeled "scholar et al.". When I try to edit metadata manually, Calibre seems to understand that "et al." is not part of the name, and suggests to author sort as "Scholar". However, Calibre will still sort the paper as "al. scholar et" unless I edit the author sort of every file manually.

I have a feeling I'm missing something really simple, but the best solution I can come up with is to tweak the author sort algorithm to include "al." as a copyword ("et al." does not work), which is ok most of the time, but not always. How can I make calibre automatically ignore "et al." when sorting authors?

Try poking 'et-al' into the suffixwords or copywords settings of the Preferences->Tweaks->Author sort name algorithm.

BR

[Rubikscube]

Thanks.

Originally Posted by theducks

You can also 'Manage Authors' in the Tag browser to do a 1 off (per author) sort value

Yeah, but for hundreds of papers that would be a pain.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Try poking 'et-al' into the suffixwords or copywords settings of the Preferences->Tweaks->Author sort name algorithm.

That works. It will require me to manually add a dash in the filename of every file before adding them to library, but I guess would take less time than I've spent on this problem already.

It still bothers me that Calibre seems to understands natively that "et al." (without the dash) is a redundancy when sorting authors. Still, Calibre will not sort my authors that way.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Rubikscube

Thanks.



Yeah, but for hundreds of papers that would be a pain.



That works. It will require me to manually add a dash in the filename of every file before adding them to library, but I guess would take less time than I've spent on this problem already.

It still bothers me that Calibre seems to understands natively that "et al." (without the dash) is a redundancy when sorting authors. Still, Calibre will not sort my authors that way.

Did you try 'et al.' in the tweak, Not sure why I even typed the dash nor why I left off the dot

BR

[Rubikscube]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Did you try 'et al.' in the tweak, Not sure why I even typed the dash nor why I left off the dot

Yes, I did try that before I started this thread, but is doesn't work, presumably because of the blank space. I have tried to replace the blank space with an underscore too, but likewise didn't work (maybe that would work if I put an underscore in all my filenames). I thought you added the dash because you were aware of this

[kovidgoyal]

Use the bulk metadata edit dialog to automatically set the author sort, for all books, if as you say calibre is suggesting the correct author sort, then that should work fine.

[Rubikscube]

Just checked again, it does not work with underscore either way. The only solution is to use a dash.

[Rubikscube]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Use the bulk metadata edit dialog to automatically set the author sort, for all books, if as you say calibre is suggesting the correct author sort, then that should work fine.

If I go to edit metadata in bulk and just just tick the box for "automatically set author sort", nothing happens. It will be showing the same red box in author sort if I try to edit metadata individually afterwards. That is if I got your advice right.

Even if I manually press the sort button in the individual edit, or manual write my preferred sort value in the bulk edit, the actual sorting will not change. The only thing that has changed is the author sort value in the edit metadata dialog, not the author sort value in the manager author dialog. The only way I can make it correct after loading the file is to manually change the sort value in the author manager.

I get a feeling that I just need to change a setting somewhere, but I can't figure where that would be.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Rubikscube

…
I thought you added the dash because you were aware of this

My alter-ego must have been aware of it, because I certainly wasn't.

maybe that's how intuition works.

FWIW: If I'm adding to a library that extracts the Authors' names from the file name I like to get it right before I add the book format file. So, I would put the 'et-al.' in the file name, using a rename utility if I had multiple instances.

BR

[kovidgoyal]

I dont see how that could happen, but you could then just use the search and replace tab of th ebulk metadata edit dialog instead to remove et al

[Rubikscube]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I dont see how that could happen, but you could then just use the search and replace tab of th ebulk metadata edit dialog instead to remove et al

Oh, I didn't try that before. Unfortunately it doesn't work either. Again, it will be changing the author sort I see in the individual edit dialog, but not the author sort in the manage author dialog. If I have previously done the automatic sort with the individual metadata edit, the bulk search-and-replace will not find "et al." because it is already removed from author sort (but not in the author manager). Calibre seems to be storing two different author sort values for each file and only tweaking the one which is not used to actually sort the data. BTW: I tried to update Calibre before starting this thread, so I'm running the 4.20 version. It didn't help the problem.

BR. Yes, that is exactly what I intend to do, as of now, manually adding "et-al." to the filename is the best solution.

[lrpirlet]

I know that this is an old topic, but I had the same with what we call ANTHOLOGIE in french A book presented by one authors containing novelettes by many authors...

I wanted to have in booth the author and the author_sort "ANTHOLOGIE par Asimov. My solution was to enter ANTHOLOGIE in the author_name_copywords.

From the help in the author_sort algorithm tweak : "The author_name_copywords are a set of words which, if they occur in an author name, cause the automatically generated author sort string to be identical to the author name. "

[kovidgoyal]

You dont need to mess wiht the tweaks for one off things, you simply manually correct the automatically generated author sort. The corrected version will be used from then on for that author.