Save Books to Disk Template Problem

[Buckskin]

I have categories in my Author list i.e.

Tony Abbot & Colleen Madden (Illustration)
Alexandre Dumas & Robin Buss (Translation)

Is it is designed to do the Author_Sort ignores the entry in brackets. However, when I Save to Disk I would like the author as author_sort but including the element in brackets. I have looked through the manual and many entries in the Forum and haven't found an easy way of doing this. If I was using C or other programming language I would just split the author field into words and iterate through each entry. In Calibres template languages I don't know how to do this.

I cannot just use author_sort and the last word in author if it is in brackets because there may be more than one author entry in brackets.

If anyone has a way of doing this, or a better way of tracking Illustrators, Editors, Translators etc. I would like to hear from you.

Thank you

[eschwartz]

You could use a custom column to store the illustrators and translators -- they are arguably not "authors".

Alternatively, you could manually set the author_sort, it is the automatic derivation of author_sort which doesn't include the parentheses content.
Or use the list_re() function to apply a regex to each element in "authors", specifying & as the list separator.


Personally I favor the custom column. I would rather separate information that is semantically different.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Buckskin

If I was using C or other programming language I would just split the author field into words and iterate through each entry. In Calibres template languages I don't know how to do this.

You can write a User-defined template function in python to do things like this.

Look at calibre's source code "calibre.db.cache" see what is in the mi structure.

The built-in template function 'author_sorts' gets close to what you want and probably can be used as a starting point.

def evaluate(self, formatter, kwargs, mi, locals, val_sep):
    sort_data = mi.author_sort_map
    if not sort_data:
        return ''
    names = [sort_data.get(n) for n in mi.authors if n.strip()]
    return val_sep.join(n for n in names)

Instead of using a comprehension, iterate through the authors building the sort string from the author_sort_map and adding on the stuff in parenthesis.

[Buckskin]

eschwartz
Thank you for your suggestions. I have managed to extract the elements with brackets into a UDC but have so far not been able to work out a way of adding them to author_sort (list_union seems a possible method it I can get the bracketed items into a matching list)

I prefer to limit the number of columns I use and I am not too precious about differentiating between the true author and others. To maintain a list of authors only would take more time than I am willing to invest because I have a lot of multi author magazines and anthologies. (:

I use the Quality Check plug-in to ensure that my author_sort are up to scratch and manually editing author-sort would cause much confusion.

chaley
This looks like something I could work with so I am going to give it a go.

Thank you to both of you.

Are there any examples of complex templates (with explanation) ? (and UDF;s come to that)

Regards

[eschwartz]

Sticky: Plugboard, template, and custom composite column recipes

Has a lot of custom templates designed for specific needs, and the first post collects a bunch of generic ones.

UDFs are not quite as common, mostly because the template language is mostly all that people need.
But you can do literally anything you want so long as it can be programmed in python based on the input of a metadata column.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Buckskin

(and UDF;s come to that)

The source for every built-in template function is available at http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gene...plate_ref.html. UDFs use the same structure.

You can find several examples of "real" UDFs by searching for "def evaluate" (with the quotes) with MobileRead's advance search. Be sure to change the result from "threads" to "posts".