Forma Any Way to Make "List" View an Actual List?

[enuddleyarbl]

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this, but thought I'd ask (just to be sure). My Forma can show my books in either List View or Cover View. Cover View is pretty much as expected. But, List View is giving me issues:

1. It still shows the cover. It's a small thumbnail, so it's not really a space problem width-wise. But, height-wise, it really restricts how many books can be "listed" on the page. Also, it's too small for my old eyes to really see.
2. The right half (almost) of the list includes the scroll bar, and book status/statistics. That's fine and dandy, but that's about as much space as the ..."
3. Book Title, Series and Author. And, here's the big problem. If I put the Forma in I'm-Old-And-Can't-See-Anymore-Darnit mode (More > Beta Features > Large Print Mode), the title shows only about 2 words. In regular mode, about 4 words. That's not enough information to easily browse my collection. Especially with my title naming scheme (see below).

So, is there any way to make the List View into an actual list? IOW, no cover, no book status/statistics, and the majority of the line being the actual title of the book (like, sigh, my old Kindle)?

Since I'm almost positive the answer to the above is no, I think I'm going to have to go through my Calibre library and modify my book naming scheme. In my Kindle days (all of about 2 weeks ago ), I included the series and book number into the title (i.e., [series name], Book [number]: [title]). I'm guessing I should left the title as pure title and added the series/book information into what I'd saved to my Kindle via a plugboard instead. Since the Forma handles series/book number information better than my Kindle, I don't need that any more (and if I have to save back to my old Kindle, I can do that with a plugboard). Is there an easy way to go through all those titles and remove the series name and book number from the titles? Or, am I just going to have to spend a couple of days manually editing them?

EDIT: Just for posterity, I did a bulk replace in Calibre to remove my series/book# from my titles. I went to Edit Metadata > Edit Metadata in bulk, switched the Search Mode at the right side to Regular Expression, the Search Field to Title, and Search For the ^(.+):\s\s (the ^ starts the search at the start of the field, the (.+) matches any characters, and the :\s\s matches a colon followed by two blanks. I left Replace With empty and for Your Test I just entered something that looks like my standard title naming scheme. Actually, the generic description I used in the above paragraph works fine there. In my case the Test Result was just the [title] information. Surprisingly, it all worked fine. I expected at least a few mis-matched replacements, but didn't get any. I re-synced my metadata between Calibre and the Forma and things are much more readable now.

And here are a couple of screenshots of what I'm trying to describe by not being able to see enough text under My Books. The first image is with Large Print on:



This second image is with Large Print off:

[davidfor]

The answer as you guesses is no. A long time ago there was an option to not show the cover, but, it didn't really give much more space and did not increase the number of books.

The best thing you can do is to remove the series name from the title. This is common for other devices that do not have series support, but, not really needed on Kobo devices. Using a plugboard for those devices is a much better idea than fiddling with the title in the calibre library. If you want to see the title in a different format in calibre, you can add a custom column to format it however you like.

[geek1011]

I think I found where the number of items it puts on each page is defined a while ago, so if @jackie_w felt like figuring out how to reduce the height of each entry, I think I could probably make a patch for this.

Edit: I just took a quick look, and this won't require CSS changes. Everything's in the code. I did find the right place, but it's a bit more complicated than expected, so I won't work on this until I've worked through the rest of my backlog.

[enuddleyarbl]

Strictly speaking, this isn't on topic. But, since I bulk edited my book titles in Calibre to remove the series and book number to ease readability on my Forma, I thought I'd bring this up here. I've also edited all my titles to match a "proper" sort order. IOW, I've actually changed the titles to place any leading A(n) or The at the end. Should I revert that as well? If I do, I'm not sure how they'll look when saved to the device. If those articles get put back on the front (even though the sorting is done by the first non-article), it might reduce the amount of informative text displayed in the Forma's title line.

[davidfor]

That is again up to you. But, my rule for calibre is not to mess with these things. That comes from watching others using calibre hit issues like yours. Some of the others have been a lot worse as they seem to be fighting against calibre rather than working with the tool to achieve what they want. Keeping the title and author as what would show on the book and using the sort fields or a custom column and plugboards just seems to work better.

And as I mention plugboards, the one I use for the author is:

program: raw_list('authors', ', ')

That goes into the authors field and formats multiple authors in the way that Kobo prefers and will build the series list correctly and sort by author correctly.

[enuddleyarbl]

Thanks. I'd seen your author plugboard earlier and copied it into my own plugboard for any format/any device. I've now used a bulk metadata edit to change my titles where I'd put the article at the end so that they are back at the start. To see titles on my Forma with the articles back at the end, would I just add a line to the above plugboard listing {title_sort} as the Source Template and title as the Destination Field?

EDIT: the {title_sort} -> {title} plugboard line seems to work fine. Also, it's probably not the most elegant solution in the world, but if someone's looking for a way to put the definite/indefinite articles back at the front of their titles after having manually moved them to the back over the years, I went to Edit Metadata > Edit Metadata in bulk, and:

- switched the Search Mode at the right side to Regular Expression
- set the Search Field field to Title
- set the Search For field to ^(.+),\s(the|The) (the ^ starts the search at the start of the field, the (.+) matches any characters, and the ,\s(the|The) matches a comma followed by one blank and either "the" or "The")
- set the Replace With field to The \1

That replaces all of any matched titles with the word "The " followed by the first field of the match (i.e., everything up to the ", The" or ", the"). I probably could have just switched the search over to being case-insensitive and avoided the "the|The" business. Also, it's possible that there might be an embedded substring of ", the" somewhere in the middle of the title. But, a search in the main library window for title:"~(.+),\sthe" showed that I didn't run into that situation. However, with the indefinite articles "a" and "an", I did have that issue. So, I just did a search for title:"~(.+),\sa" in the main library window and manually edited the very small number of valid instances from there.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by DaveLessnau

Thanks. I'd seen your author plugboard earlier and copied it into my own plugboard for any format/any device. I've now used a bulk metadata edit to change my titles where I'd put the article at the end so that they are back at the start. To see titles on my Forma with the articles back at the end, would I just add a line to the above plugboard listing {title_sort} as the Source Template and title as the Destination Field?

EDIT: the {title_sort} -> {title} plugboard line seems to work fine.

Yes, that should work. If you want to check how it looks, turn off the automatic updating of metadata in the driver, and use my Kobo Utilities plugin to update a few books. There is a metadata update option to do this.

Also, it's probably not the most elegant solution in the world, but if someone's looking for a way to put the definite/indefinite articles back at the front of their titles after having manually moved them to the back over the years, I went to Edit Metadata > Edit Metadata in bulk, and:

- switched the Search Mode at the right side to Regular Expression
- set the Search Field field to Title
- set the Search For field to ^(.+),\s(the|The) (the ^ starts the search at the start of the field, the (.+) matches any characters, and the ,\s(the|The) matches a comma followed by one blank and either "the" or "The")
- set the Replace With field to The \1

That replaces all of any matched titles with the word "The " followed by the first field of the match (i.e., everything up to the ", The" or ", the"). I probably could have just switched the search over to being case-insensitive and avoided the "the|The" business. Also, it's possible that there might be an embedded substring of ", the" somewhere in the middle of the title. But, a search in the main library window for title:"~(.+),\sthe" showed that I didn't run into that situation. However, with the indefinite articles "a" and "an", I did have that issue. So, I just did a search for title:"~(.+),\sa" in the main library window and manually edited the very small number of valid instances from there.

That looks right. But, I would have used:

^(.+),\s(the|The)$

That should anchor the query properly. And I'd probably use:

^(.+),\s(the|a|an)$

With case sensitivity off. Then the replace is:

\2 \1

And then use "Title case" in the "Apply function after replace" option. Though I might just do the replace and look at how many were wrong to fix.

Also, I would take a copy of the database for the library. I know I'd mess up somewhere and want to restore it.

[enuddleyarbl]

Thanks. I'd been wondering if there were a way to check the end of line. Knowing that $ should come in handy. And I should have thought of the \2 \1 replacement.

Regarding the "full" search:

^(.+),\s(the|a|an)$

I'd wondered about matching "a" before "an". Is the regex parsed left-to-right within the parentheses? If it is, it might catch a trailing

", an"

as

", a"

and leave an "n" hanging off the end of the title. Perhaps just changing the order to:

^(.+),\s(the|an|a)$

would do it.

EDIT: Oops. Nope. That's what the "anchor to the end" "$" is for. With that, "a" won't match "an" since it's not the last string. Sorry.