Sort by series not putting books of the same series next to each other?

[callahan09]

This is an odd one that I haven't seen before.

I've got a lot of books in my collection which are part of series', so my preferred sorting is By Series. I've just added the books from "A Series of Unfortunate Events" to my collection, and now for some reason the books don't all show up next to each other in the sorting.

I've even highlighted all 13 books in the series at the same time, edited the metadata simultaneously for each of them, was sure that the exact phrase "A Series of Unfortunate Events" was entered into the series field, and then applied the change, but it didn't fix the issue.

For some reason, Book 1 of the series is showing up near the beginning of the sort order, as if it starts with the letter "A" (which it, well, does). All 12 of the rest of the books in the series are showing up in the S's section of the sort order, ignoring the word "A" at the start of the name and just sorting it by the second word "Series".

But why is the first book in the series using the first word "A" when it sorts it, but ignoring it for the other 12 books???

[kovidgoyal]

Make sure all books have the same language, series sorting is influenced by the language of the book.

[theducks]

Not quite sure what is going on in this case, but here is a tip to make the book-series manage thing easier

Manage Series Plugin (this also uses the exact same name for all in the group. no stray characters)

Places to look while Troubleshooting ;

Tag Browser: Series. Do you see multiple entries? You can rename an entry right there: Rightclick menu: Rename
or Manage Series . But unlike Manage Authors, you can not manipulate the series_sort data from this

Tweaks: did you ever change the

# Control sorting of titles and series in the library display
title_series_sorting = 'library_order'

? That will change how article sortin was handled at entry time.

Ninjad by Kovid

[callahan09]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Make sure all books have the same language, series sorting is influenced by the language of the book.

Thanks for the fast response!

I'm not quite sure I understand why this had the effect that it was having on my series sort, but this fixed it. I looked at the metadata and the first book had a different value in the language field than the other 12, and after I changed it, they all show up next to each other in the sort order now.

(If I had to guess, it's because different languages have different rules for what words to ignore in sort order? For English, the word "A" is ignored, but not for Spanish, perhaps?)

[kovidgoyal]

yes, series and title are sorted in a language specific way.