How does calibre identify author link?

[arpeggioaccele]

After updating calibre 6.17 I noticed that some books had a neat little arrow to click to open the link to the author's profile page (for Ao3 generated epubs).

But only some authors had a link— which ones seemed random, not newly imported files or specific types of links. I looked around to see if there was a way to import the link from the text, because I did not want to add in the links manually. I think I did find an answer to my problem here:

But I tried to look around the code to see how calibre found the author's link in the first place, I couldn't find it in the metadata and I had trouble reading the code.

I'm pretty sure this is the update that added the feature.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibr...1983679dadeef6

From Release: 6.16 [20 Apr, 2023]
Book details: if an item has an associated link then offer that link in the item's context menu

If anyone could help clarify how this works it would be nice to know, even if it doesn't help fill in those links automatically.

---

Also, while looking for that I found this from Release: 6.15.1 [07 Apr, 2023]

Allow adding external links to tags, series, publishers, etcetera in addition to authors
The links show up as click-able icons in the book details panel. They can be set by right clicking the author/tag/etc. in the Tag browser and choosing "Manage"

I also tried to put in associated links for series and got an error:

calibre, version 6.17.0
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>TypeError</b>:'NoneType' object is not iterable

calibre 6.17  embedded-python: True
macOS-13.3.1-arm64-arm-64bit Darwin ('64bit', '')
('Darwin', '22.4.0', 'Darwin Kernel Version 22.4.0: Mon Mar  6 20:59:28 PST 2023; root:xnu-8796.101.5~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000')
Python 3.10.1
OSX: ('13.3.1', ('', '', ''), 'arm64')
Interface language: None
Successfully initialized third party plugins: Gather KFX-ZIP (from KFX Input) (1, 50, 0) && DeDRM (10, 0, 3) && Package KFX (from KFX Input) (1, 50, 0) && Count Pages (1, 13, 0) && EpubMerge (2, 15, 0) && Extract People Other Metadata (1, 0, 0) && FanFicFare (4, 22, 1) && Find Duplicates (1, 10, 8) && KFX metadata reader (from KFX Input) (1, 50, 0) && KFX Input (1, 50, 0) && Modify ePub (1, 8, 1) && Reading List (1, 15, 1) && WordDumb (3, 29, 1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "calibre/gui2/tag_browser/ui.py", line 284, in do_tags_list_edit
  File "calibre/gui2/dialogs/tag_list_editor.py", line 230, in __init__
  File "calibre/gui2/dialogs/tag_list_editor.py", line 425, in fill_in_table
  File "calibre/gui2/dialogs/tag_list_editor.py", line 390, in create_table
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

am I doing something wrong here?

[arpeggioaccele]

Actually I'm not sure the feature in book details is new, I just never noticed it.

I forgot to add other mentions of authors link I thought were helpful context:
bulk editing authors links seems to be possible, not through the gui though, editing the db directly
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...ht=author+link

from today, the link is in the opf and links can be added calibre api instead of the manage authors option
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=353946

[kovidgoyal]

That error is a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2018548

and calibre does not auto fill in URLs you have to enter them.

[arpeggioaccele]

I thought so, but I didn't enter them and they appeared which was confusing. I still can't figure out where the link might have been in the epub metadata. I guessed that it formatted the link based on some line, href?, in the epub file.

Anyways I'll try to set up something to format the author name into a link then put it back into calibre, should be simple enough to add the website url to the username. It would be nice if there was a way to set a rule for building the link from the author name...
Based on this post it should be possible to edit the db directly to bulk edit author's link...
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=336056
Or by using the api somehow
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=353946

[arpeggioaccele]

https://imgur.com/a/CEjWUGa

Here's what I mean, these links just appeared, while others did not. How can that happen?

[arpeggioaccele]

I couldn't understand why there were links at all since I didn't put them in. It does make sense that I need to put in the links though. The author link isn't new, I think I just didn't notice it lol.

I saw other posts that said I can bulk edit the author links in the db or with the api. But that sounds too complicated, the most I can do is set a rule to turn author name into a link or extract the link from the fulltext into another column using a plugin. It would make sense to have a bulk edit button for managing authors like other metadata, but might be too complicated idk.

[kovidgoyal]

most likely the existing links came from some plugin, such as fanficfare.

[arpeggioaccele]

Sorry for the confusing replies, I thought they kept getting deleted— oops.

I think that's what happened! Thanks for the help <3

[ownedbycats]

If you're a FanFicFare user, author link is set by default. Check the Standard Columns tab in its config.

[kevn57]

>Check the Standard Columns tab in its config.

Thanks