Read contributors metadata from ePub file contents

[d3m0sth3n3s]

I have defined a couple of custom columns in my library (#translators and #illustrators) to store information about this kind of contributors.

How can I get calibre to parse this information when adding new books to my library? (If it can be done later, it's fine with me too.)

Specifically, I have ePub ebooks with the following metadata entries in their content.opf file:

<dc:contributor opf:file-as="Villarino, M. I." opf:role="trl">M. I. Villarino</dc:contributor>

<dc:contributor opf:file-as="Pickard, Charles" opf:role="ill">Charles Pickard</dc:contributor>

The former is translators info and the latter corresponds to illustrators info. Therefore, the information I want is there, in my ebook files. I just don’t know how to get it automatically into calibre.

[un_pogaz]

Holy, I join you, it could be interesting.
First, there is no similar feature in Calibre, but maybe a plugin exists... but I never heard about it.
There is a good chance that you need to create this plugin
(Oh no please, tell me that someone has already done something like that, I already see the new project coming that will kill my nights)

[kovidgoyal]

There is no facility in calibre for mapping epub metadata fields to custom columns. You would basically need to modify the epub metadata reader and writer plugins to map custom column names to epub metadata.

[un_pogaz]

*contritted laugh*
Yes, precisely, I'm not that naive. Thank you for confirming that I will have to dive deep into the code to find, deconstruct and rebuild the author section of the "reader and writer metadata". That promises a lot of fun.
At least the good news is that everything is a created, so there is little chance that I will reinvent a wheel that already exist.

And that's just the first step. Fortunately there are other plugins to guide me through the rest (link colunml to metadata value), but it's not going to be easy though, Yeah.

I'm walking towards a precipice sincerely happy and with a smile on my face... whoever you are, never learn to code: this is the beginning of the terrible sado-masochistic relationship.

[theducks]

I simply add these folk to the Authors field with their (not Author) role in paren

Joe Smith (Ilus)&Sally Wright (ed)&Joel Ngu (trans)

Kiss, no extra fields (columns) needed.
FWIW Author_sort ignores the part in paren

[d3m0sth3n3s]

Thank you everyone for your responses.

For now, it’s out of my reach to modify a calibre plugin, but some day I will try to learn how to do it. If un_pogaz wants to take that path first, I won’t complain.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

There is no facility in calibre for mapping epub metadata fields to custom columns.

Originally Posted by theducks

I simply add these folk to the Authors field with their (not Author) role in paren
Joe Smith (Ilus)&Sally Wright (ed)&Joel Ngu (trans)

And what about theducks approach? Could it be possible to map these metadata entries to the built-in Authors field the way he does it when adding books to a library? This way, it would be just a matter of performing a Search & Replace operation in bulk metadata edition later on to get this information copied into custom columns.

Aren’t these dc:contributor standard metadata entries? I remember having seen them also in PDF documents in the past.

[DiapDealer]

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