Metadata personal.ini questions w/Calibre plug-in

[Montana Harper]

I've been playing around with the personal.ini file for a couple of days now and I've managed to figure out almost everything I want to do, but I have a couple of questions still.

First, when using regex with metadata, can I change the author metadata, too? I've got other things set to find & replace successfully, but the author ones don't seem to work.

Second...ugh. This is complicated. Let me try to step-by-step what I want.

I primarily download my fic from AO3, store it in Calibre, and transfer it to Stanza on my iPad via WiFi via the "Shared" menu in Stanza.

I've tweaked my titlepage_entries to be the way I like it. The code looks like this:
titlepage_entries: series, <hr />, rating, warnings, ao3categories, category, ships, characters,  freefromtags, collections, <br />, status, <hr />, numWords, numChapters, comments, kudos, bookmarks, hits, datePublished, dateUpdated, dateCreated, siteabbrev, <hr />, description

I'd like to keep the title page looking like that, with all of that data included.

I've set up custom columns for ao3categories, freefromtags, characters, category, rating, ships, status, warnings, and numWords. I'd also like to keep that the way it is. I don't pay attention to Calibre's default Tags column at all, because it smushes together several types of data that I want broken out separately. If I could actually get FFDL to stop populating that column, that'd be great, but if not, I can always periodically bulk delete it.

Okay, here's the hard part: I'd like to only have certain types of data (category, rating, and ships) embedded as metadata into the epub, so that they're sortable in Stanza's "groups" without becoming overwhelming. I know I could have Calibre re-convert the files to wipe all the tag metadata, but that's really not any better because it's only sortable by author and title.

So basically, is it possible to have a bunch of tag data as text on the title page, while only embedding a more limited set of data into the file? (And if I can't do it with FFDL, is there someone else I can use to bulk edit the metadata in the epubs, because one-by-one with Sigil is a pain in the butt.)

TIA!

~Montana

[Jim Miller]

On 12/31/2012 7:33 PM, Montana Harper wrote:
>
> First, when using regex with metadata, can I change the author metadata,
> too? I've got other things set to find & replace successfully, but the
> author ones don't seem to work.

I don't understand. I can use replace_metadata with author just fine.
For example:

replace_metadata:
author=>aa=>bb

I'm going to need to see an example to comment any further on that one.

> I'd like to keep the title page looking like that, with all of that data
> included.

Okay, sounds like you have that part working already.

> I've set up custom columns for *ao3categories*, *freefromtags*,
> *characters*, *category*, *rating*, *ships*, *status*, *warnings*, and
> *numWords*. I'd also like to keep that the way it is. I don't pay

> attention to Calibre's default Tags column at all, because it smushes
> together several types of data that I want broken out separately. If I
> could actually get FFDL to stop populating that column, that'd be great,
> but if not, I can always periodically bulk delete it.

<shrug> Seems to me it would be easier to simply hide the standard tags
column rather than worrying about emptying it, but that's your choice.
You can prevent FFDL from ever putting anything in tags with:

[overrides]
include_subject_tags:
extratags:

(That was supposed to be freeformtags, not freefromtags. I'll have to
fix that in the next version.)

> Okay, here's the hard part: I'd like to only have certain types of data (category, rating, and ships) embedded as metadata into the epub, so that they're sortable in Stanza's "groups" without becoming overwhelming.

...
> So basically, is it possible to have a bunch of tag data */as text/* on

> the title page, while only embedding a more limited set of data into the
> file?

Sure. You can include only those in the subjects/tags:

include_subject_tags:category, rating, ships
extratags:

But that conflicts with your earlier desire to not populate the calibre
standard tags column. FFDL assumes that what ends up in epub subjects
should also appear in tags.

To meet both desires, you could have FFDL not populate subjects/tags as
shown above and then use calibre's metadata plugboard feature to fill
tags in each epub from your custom columns as it's written to the
device. Use a Source Template like:

{#category:||,}{#rating:||,}{#ships}

...and set the Destination Field to tags. (Metadata plugboards are very
powerful. I use them to include number of words and tags in the titles
of all my epubs on my nook device for searching.)

Jim

--
Jim Miller
Retie...@gmail.com

[Montana Harper]

Augh. It looks like GGroups ate my reply. Just in case it spits it out again later, I'm not going to re-create it. Suffice it to say you've solved my problems, thank you. I have to go find more info on plugboards now, because they're really useful. :-)