Aura ONE Help needed with author sort

[PapaJohn]

Can the Aura One be forced to sort by authors first name in the book view?
I don't know if this can be done with a plugboard in calibre.
Hopefully someone can help me out. I am not smart enough to figure this out.

[davidfor]

For the authors, the device assumes the last word in a name is the surname and that is used for sorting. If you want to sort by first name, you would need to remove the space between the parts of the names so it looks like one word. You could do that by replacing the space with something else. Someone in the past used an underscore, but, there are probably character that can be used that will appear as a space but not get treated as one. Sorry, I can't suggest one. I'm pretty sure it has been discussed before, but, not for a while.

And if you can come up with a character that works and you like, then you could use a metadata plugboard to change it.

[PapaJohn]

Originally Posted by davidfor

For the authors, the device assumes the last word in a name is the surname and that is used for sorting. If you want to sort by first name, you would need to remove the space between the parts of the names so it looks like one word. You could do that by replacing the space with something else. Someone in the past used an underscore, but, there are probably character that can be used that will appear as a space but not get treated as one. Sorry, I can't suggest one. I'm pretty sure it has been discussed before, but, not for a while.

And if you can come up with a character that works and you like, then you could use a metadata plugboard to change it.

That wouldn't work for epubs with multiple authors.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by PapaJohn

That wouldn't work for epubs with multiple authors.

Why not? It is a matter of how you build the string. And it is a matter of how you want the sorting to work. In any book list, a book is in only one place. So that means that when sorting by author, uses the first author to position the book. In your case, you put the non-breaking character in each author name, separate them by commas, and it will sort on the first author. Or you put the non-breaking character between every word in all author names and between them, without commas, and it will sort by the full string.

[PapaJohn]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Why not? It is a matter of how you build the string. And it is a matter of how you want the sorting to work. In any book list, a book is in only one place. So that means that when sorting by author, uses the first author to position the book. In your case, you put the non-breaking character in each author name, separate them by commas, and it will sort on the first author. Or you put the non-breaking character between every word in all author names and between them, without commas, and it will sort by the full string.

Could you show me an example? I am not savvy enough to figure this out on my own.

[davidfor]

The plugboard to do what I am thinking of is fairly simple:

{authors:'re($, ' ', '_')'}

All that does is replace all the spaces in the authors field with an underscore. For a case with to authors, this would look like:

Jennifer_Martucci_&_Christopher_Martucci

The device will see this as one author and sort the books under "J". In the Author list, there will be only one author.

[PapaJohn]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The plugboard to do what I am thinking of is fairly simple:

{authors:'re($, ' ', '_')'}

All that does is replace all the spaces in the authors field with an underscore. For a case with to authors, this would look like:

Jennifer_Martucci_&_Christopher_Martucci

The device will see this as one author and sort the books under "J". In the Author list, there will be only one author.

OK. Thank you. I will give that a try.

[PapaJohn]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The plugboard to do what I am thinking of is fairly simple:

{authors:'re($, ' ', '_')'}

All that does is replace all the spaces in the authors field with an underscore. For a case with to authors, this would look like:

Jennifer_Martucci_&_Christopher_Martucci

The device will see this as one author and sort the books under "J". In the Author list, there will be only one author.

This works, I was able to update books already on the device.
Is there any other way of achieving this with a non-displaying character?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by PapaJohn

This works, I was able to update books already on the device.
Is there any other way of achieving this with a non-displaying character?

Just replace the underscore with whatever character you want. It is more a matter of finding a suitable character. Though, you might have to specify the character as an HTML entity. I think someone has done that to get something unusual in the title or the author.