Metadata comments formatting?

[darrenmcg]

Hello everyone, is there a way to disable the formatting in the metadata comments section?
Currently I clear all formatting but I'm usually left with something like:
<p class="description">blah,blah,blah</p>
or:
<p>blah,blah,blah</p>
I'd like to get rid of all that and just have:
blah,blah,blah
Also, is there a way to disable the formatting toolbar in the comments section all together?

I'm trying to have a "clean" <dc:description> in the epubs content.opf file

[eschwartz]

No, calibre automatically adds html formatting. The minimum you can get away with is a set of p tags.

But if you don't modify the description, calibre will not mess around with it. That's the only way to get plaintext comments.

[darrenmcg]

Oh, ok, thanks.
Does Calibre also add them during format conversion?

[eschwartz]

No, it's part of the metadata editing I am pretty sure.

calibre won't modify your metadata on its own, but it does have its own rules about how you can update it. Namely, it will auto-htmlize any changed metadata you modify the book record with.

[dickloraine]

You could modify calibre itself or make a plugin. I think calibre runs your description only through some function, likely names txt2html or something like that. Shouldn't be that hard, but I don't know, if this could negatively impact for example the fetching of metadata.

[eschwartz]

in "src/calibre/library/comments.py" see the function "comments_to_html"

[darrenmcg]

Thanks guys.

[chaley]

Just for completeness: it is possible to use bulk search/replace to clean HTML out of comments.

Step 1: create a custom template function. In my case I named it myFunc2.


The actual text of the function is

def evaluate(self, formatter, kwargs, mi, locals, t):
	from calibre.utils.html2text import html2text
	return html2text(t)

Then use bulk search/replace with something like the following. In this case I am changing a custom comments column, but it would work on the normal one. The custom column contains the following raw HTML:

<p class="description"><font color="#ff0000">This comment set to red text.</font></p>

Running the search replace changes it as shown in the screen capture.

I checked metadata.opf and indeed the HTML is gone.

[eschwartz]

Oh, cool. Leveraging S&R to evade the comments editor post-processing.

Why didn't I think of that?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Oh, cool. Leveraging S&R to evade the comments editor post-processing.

Why didn't I think of that?

Because you need to leave at least ONE solution to someone else

[Terisa de morgan]

I've made a small plugin with the same goal (among other things )

[eschwartz]

Care to share it?

[Terisa de morgan]

Not at all. This is my plugin and the function (it's a menu option too) is "_do replace_text). Keep in mind that:

1. It's totally specific and..
2. My first try to do a plugin and
3. One of my first attempts with python

So it probably will be a mess

[darrenmcg]

Thanks for your suggestion chaley. I tried your suggestion, but couldn't get it to work with the standard comments section. However, I've managed to do it using regex. Tested and it works fine, also tested with an absolutely tag trashed comment and it works too.