[FanFicFare] Metadata Management for Fanfiction

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

While not entirely 'metadata' management, what methods do people use to download fics that aren't on the various FFF-supported websites? Old static webpages mostly.

Ive been using EpubPress, but I'm not entirely happy with it.

SingleFile and Calibre convert is what I'm using now, thoug I still have to do some light editing on the resulting ePub and fill the metadata manually.

[citac]

Hello, I realize this thread is old by this point, but I was wondering if you ever completed the guide you were working on? After a long time not using calibre and fanficfare myself I find myself in need of relearning both. I no longer have my old personal.ini file (old laptop died and I had no backup of it), and it's difficult to find my way around the forums and pick up bits and pieces of information (though I am going through threads and collecting what I can).

If anyone else has something I'd also appreciate it.

Originally Posted by dailyalice

Love to see what other people are doing. Thanks everybody.

I dislike the FanFicFare's default behavior that dumps a ton of data into the main calibre Tags column/field so I actually edit my personal.ini so FanFicFare doesn't put anything in subject_tags. (I know it works for some people since these fields/columns are easily searched, but I like having things in separate columns/fields.)

Instead I have a bunch of custom columns for the data. Relationships column, Fandom column, Warnings column, etc.

The most important custom column, that I always create first, is the "Saved Metadata" column so I always have all available data from archives in my library. That way if I mess around with adding new columns or changing them, I can always fill them from Saved Metadata without having to redownload fic.

Though it is best to figure out what metadata you value the most and how you want it presented sooner rather than later, especially if you make anthologies (which won't work with Saved Metadata). Or if you want data to look a certain way on title pages. You can inject new generated covers into epubs without too much trouble, but not title pages.

Here's my post over in the FanFicFare thread about how I have a tag column that's unedited AO3 freeform tags called Tags (AO3) and another tag column currently named Tags (Edited) which is "only" about 450 tags, some pulled straight from AO3's freeform tags, some modified using replace_metadata.

Basically I only keep the tags from AO3's tags that I find useful. Any time I hear someone say they want to try to normalize all the AO3 tags, I point out how futile it is. You can use the data! But my Tags (AO3) column has over 30,000 tags in it (I wish I were exaggerating). Tags (Edited) has 450 or so which is much more manageable to say the least.

I keep Tags (AO3) around so I have the data and can look at it or search it if I want to. And to have that information on title pages. (But I mostly ignore it in the tag browser.)



I'm intrigued by this. If you dump freeform tags into a long text column, do the tags then show up in the order they're written on AO3? I'm guessing they would.

Because that's a thing I'd like to have on my title pages: the freeformtags as posted. When you put them in a tags column, they're alphabetized which would be fine if people actually used them as tags but of course some authors practically tell stories in the tags (and yes, I like to keep the stories I suppose).