Truncated directory names from Send to Device template

[nixR3ad]

I'm a kobo user, and I finally switched to Koreader 100% (not just PDFs anymore). So, the send-to-device template is something I'm only now looking at after 7 years of supporting Calibre. I'm using a Sage at the moment. My template is

Books/{#genre}/{author_sort}/{series:|| -} {series_index:re(^(\d)(\.|$),0\1\2)|| -} {title} - {authors}

Where #genre is a custom column to which a book is assigned exactly one value.

I sent a book to the device with the genre: Buddhism.

It worked almost correctly. However, the top directory is 'Boks' instead of 'Books.' Nested beneath that, I have 'Budism' instead of 'Buddhism.' Likewise, the author's name was shortened.

I have the same template stored in Calibre's device-send and Kobo utility plugin (I'm using the extended driver), because I don't know which setting is being respected. When I use this template for 'Save to Disk," it works fine.

Am I doing something incorrectly? It's not a huge impact... I can find the book, and after 7 years of trying to tweak the "Perfect Reader Library," I'm now old and just want to read. While this one title is easy to find, I worry about pushing my other 300 titles to the device this way.

[theducks]

That is done to comply with Path length limits for the lesser of all OS.

Your issue is a perfect example of why file by metadata is such a weak choice and why something like the Calibre Tag Browser is so great for selecting books.
Pick an Author, and only 3 exact tags. Calibre can do that
My native Kobo can do by Collection, Series or Author

[ownedbycats]

I've had this happen before.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I'm not sure if this would also be present with the regular Kobo driver.

I ran into a glitch where between the length of multiple (long) author names and the .kepub extension, the filepath seemed to hit some sort of limit and truncated part of my custom save path ({#kobopath}/{author_sort}/{title} - {authors}) , resulting it ending up in K:\Fanion\ instead of \Fanfiction\.

Thankfully I was able to fix it with a {author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)} to show only the main author, but I found it strange that it truncated the path instead of the filename. Did I make a user error?

Originally Posted by davidfor

The path creation is done by calibre. The drivers supply a maximum path length and calibre works something out in that. It does tend to shorten the actual file name more than the rest of the path, but, I have seen this myself. I use a couple of different libraries, and put the library name first. Occasionally the library name gets shortened. From a quick look at the code, all parts of the path can be shortened, but the longer the part, the more will be taken from it. Hence the file name part will usually be changed the most.

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

The original truncated path was exactly 180 characters (setting author_sort to a sublist shortened it to 156) and the filename did change quite a bit. If it had been able to display in full, it would've been 205 characters.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The driver sets the maximum path length to 185 characters. With it needing to remove 20 characters, I am not surprised the first directory was touched.

[nixR3ad]

My books have many tags. For as seldom I use them, I do not want to give them up. That said I don't see myself ever using the tag search function in koreader to find any titles.

The books each belong to one distinct genre. And though I know why allowing custom user metadata in the koreader config can get hairy, and I've read the discussions on Git Hub on why it isn't easily allowed.

If I could map my existing genre column to koreader's existing tag lookup, I could dispense altogether with my need for a FM based solution like my template and keep my many tags.

Sorry to get off topic, but this is what prompted the template. Suggestions (other than jump on github where I'm going next)?

[BetterRed]

How about:

Create a tag-like custom column called My Tags/#mytags,
Copy what's in tags to #mytags,
Fire up Manage Categories : Tags
Remove all the tags you don't want to see in KOReader.



Then devise a way of dealing with new books infested with tags you don't want in KOReader… perhaps via an Intake library.

BR

[nixR3ad]

Creating the top-level #shelf (genre) directories didn't always work when the complete path and filename were still very long. I decided which information I needed to find titles as well as reconstruct them on another system (data recovery), and compromised.

Since my koreader filesystem view contains the metadata, I whittled down the file paths and names to have only this:

books/{#shelf:||/}{series:||/}{author_sort:sublist(0,1,&)}-{series_index:re(^(\d)(\.|$),0\1\2)||-}{title:sublist(0,1,:)}

A 5th history book by John Smith, Shawn Frank, & Dan Brown in a series about pirates would become:

PHP Code:

books/History/Great_Pirates/Smith,_John-05-Samuel_Bellamy_for_President.epub 


A non-serial book of Poetry titled: "Nobody Bought This: Because Quite Frankly I'm Not That Great a Poet and Should Have Finished My Degree" becomes:

PHP Code:

books/Poetry/Me,_Author-Nobody_Bought_This.epub 


Then, I generate a Calibre catalog and place it at the top level.

The bit I'm working on is "personal" documents. I manage some documents with Calibre that I don't need to show beneath ~/books. I have a yes/no column to mark these as "personal." Currently, I give them the #shelf "personal," and they appear as

PHP Code:

~/books/personal/document.txt 


I'd prefer to have them saved as

PHP Code:

~/personal/document.txt 


I can't get a template correct that generates a new top-level path based on a boolean field.