[GUI Plugin] Kindle Collections (old)

meme · 01-27-2011, 04:44 AM

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This Calibre plugin allows you to manage your Kindle collections, margins, and fonts.

Main Features

Works on Kindle DX, 2, 3, and 4 non-touch (but not the Kindle Touch)
Create collections automatically on your Kindle using Calibre Authors, Series, Tags, custom columns or categories
- Preview changes before saving them
- Customize which collections are automatically created - include or ignore specific collections, add a prefix to sort collections, set minimum books counts, and even rename collections
- Import collections from your Kindle into a custom column in Calibre
Edit collections on your Kindle with a GUI without needing to use Calibre to store or manage your books
Modify your Kindle settings including horizontal margin, justification, and fonts
View a report of your Kindle collections and books - including collections sorted by most Recent, collections and books sorted by Title, books per collection, collections per book, and any duplicate, invalid, or uncollectable books
The plugin does not modify your Kindle books, or Calibre information when creating or editing collections or settings
This plugin does not work on Kindle Touch because Amazon changed the way the Kindle manages collections on the Touch. This cannot be fixed by modifying the plugin since the collection information is no longer accessible by users. You may want to contact Amazon and ask them to provide a way to manage your collections without having to edit them using the Kindle..

Install or Remove the Plugin

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Create Collections on your Kindle automatically using Calibre data

The first way to manage your collections with this plugin is to create them automatically on your Kindle using the information in Calibre. This is the best approach if you have lots of books in Calibre, especially if they are already tagged or organized.

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First Use

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Examples

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These are examples of how to customize the plugin to choose which collections are automatically created. You can test your settings using Preview Collections without any changes being made to your Kindle. Use the "Customize" menu option of the plugin to change what the plugin does.

Choose a Calibre field to use for creating collections by selecting "Create" from the down down menu in the field's "Action" column.

See the Customization Details section in this post for extensive details on the options available.

Collections for every Author, or every Series, or every Tag, etc.

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Set 'Authors' to 'Create' (or set 'Series' or 'Tags' or any field)
Make sure other fields have no Action selected
You can select 'Create' for multiple fields
Collection names that sort to the top of the list when Sorting by Title on the Kindle

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Set the Prefix column to '_'
(You can use other symbol besides "_" - see Customizations Details for more information
Collections for just 1 Author, or 1 Tag, etc.

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Set 'Authors' (or 'Tags' or any field) to 'Create'
Enter the name of the author or tag into the 'Include' column
Collections for Series if there are more than 3 books in the series

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Set 'Series' to 'Create'
Set Minimum column for 'Series' to "3"
Collections using a Custom Column

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You can select any of your custom columns just like Calibre's built in fields
See the Custom Columns section in this post for how to create custom columns - if you want more control of your collections, custom columns are the way to go
Collections for tags except those starting with "-"

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Set 'Tags' to 'Create'
Set the 'Ignore' column for 'Tags' to "^-.*" (without the quotes)
(See Customization for more information on patterns)
Collections only for the tags starting with "+" and removing the "+" before saving to the Kindle

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Set 'Tags' to 'Create'
Set the 'Include' column to: ^\+.*
Set the 'Rename from' column to: ^\+(.*)$
Set the 'Rename to' column to: \1
Collections A-Z using Author Sort

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Set 'Author Sort' to 'Create
Set prefix to: _
Set rename_from to: ^(.).*$
Set rename_to to: \1
Collections [A-Z] using Title

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Set 'Title' to 'Create
Set prefix to: [
Set suffix to: ]
Set rename_from to: ^[the|a|an]*(.).*$
Set rename_to to: \1

Collections for Special Books:

News Feeds

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Calibre Catalogs

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Periodicals - Magazines, Newspapers

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Calibre Tips: Custom Columns, Book Titles, Authors

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Custom Columns

Creating custom columns in Calibre gives you more options when naming your collections with Create Collections. So instead of just using Author or Tag names as collection names, you can create your own names. They are also needed if you want to use Import Collections. For full details see the Calibre User Manual entry for Templates at http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/template_lang.html or this thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118563s , but some basic examples are below.

Empty custom column which you can use to type in your own text (or use with Import Collections)

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For more advanced custom columns that use the information found in other columns, you have to define a Template to tell Calibre what to display. Use the steps in the example below for all of the examples that follow.

Example: Author Lastname, Firstname

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Author - Series if the book is in a series, otherwise Author

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Author - Series if the books is in a series, otherwise empty

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AuthorLastname, Firstname: Series only if the book is in a series

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Series if the book is in a series, otherwise Author

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The text "Short Stories" if there is a tag called "Short", otherwise Author

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Book Titles:

Book titles don't really have anything to do with this plugin or collections, but since its common to modify them using Calibre plugboards to make them more useful on the Kindle, here are some basic examples. These changes only affect the titles on your Kindle and not the information in Calibre. See this thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118563 for more details.

Titles with the format: SeriesName - SeriesNumber - Title

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Titles with the format: Title [SeriesNumber]

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Authors:

To show Authors as "Lastname, Firstname" on your Kindle:

Click on Preferences
Select Output Options
Click on Mobi Output on the left
Check the box labelled "Use author sort for author"
Resend your books to your Kindle

Import Collections to Calibre from your Kindle

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Customization Details

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Customizations are used when running Preview or Create Collections.

Column Settings:

Action:
- Select what to do for each Calibre column:
  Create - create collections based on the column
  Delete - delete Calibre collections if you changed your mind
Prefix:
- Choose text to add to the start of collection names to allow sorting
- You can change the prefix once the collection is created
- For example: "_" or "~" or ":" or "__" - force collection names to appear at the start of sort By Title. Don't include quotes (") in any of the fields unless you need them.
- You can use more than one character to allow indenting ("_", "__", "___")
- Leaving the prefix blank will sort collections by title along with books - works best if just using Collections view
- Sort order on the Kindle is not straightforward. The plugin attempts to sort titles exactly as they'll show up on the Kindle 3 when you use View collections or see them in the detailed report, but this may not always be accurate.
  - These characters are useful for sorting and will be sorted in this order: _`^~'([{$+<=>|"
  - The full order of the characters used when sorting by Title on the Kindle 3 is: - _,;:!?/.`^~'"()[]{}@$*&#%+<=>|0-9a-z (case is ignored)
  - You should avoid using a comma (",") to avoid issues with import into comma separated custom columns
    
    But the following characters are invisible to the sort order: -?/]#.\'\\*})&:@%;"!,
Suffix
- Choose text to add to the end of collection names, e.g. use prefix "(" and suffix ")"
- Use symbols if you want to be able to automatically change suffixes later
Minimum - Set the minimum number of books required in a collection before creating the collection
- "3" - If there are only 2 books in the collection, it won't create the collection
- leaving blank is the same as "1" - at least 1 book
- If the book count goes below the minimum, the existing collection will not be removed (unless you uncheck preserve Kindle-only)
Ignore
- Skip certain words or patterns when creating collections:
- "History, Not this author,Or this one" - ignore the exact names (do not include the quotes)
- "-.*" - ignore any entry in the column starting with "-"
- ".*anywordinthemiddle.*" - ignore any entry in the column containing the word "anywordinthemiddle"
- ".*-nocollect" - ignore any entry in the column ending with "-nocollect"
- "\[.*\]" - ignore any entry containing in brackets. The "\[" is necessary because the "[" is a special character in patterns
- leaving blank means no entries in the column are ignored
Include:
- Select only certain words/patterns when creating collections
- "History,Biography" - create only the History and Biography collections if they exist in this column
- "\+.*" - create collections from entries in this column only if they start with "+"
- If you use an ignore pattern it will be applied before the include pattern
Rename
- Advanced feature to allow you to rename Calibre collections before saving them to the Kindle.
- Uses the python command re.sub(from_pattern, to_pattern, collection_name) on your patterns to do the renaming.
- Rename is run after the ignore/include patterns
- For example, to remove the '+' at the start of any collection in Calibre, use from: ^\+(.*)$ to: \1
- To rename a specific collection, e.g., use from: "\[PDOC\]" to: "Personal Documents"
- To merge 2 names into one use: from: ^(FirstTag|SecondTag)$ to: NewMergedName (the old collections will still be on the Kindle until you remove them)
Split on character
- If you have a plain text column instead of a tags like column, you can split the text into separate collection names
- For example, if you had a plain text column containing "A/B/Sea" and entered "/" as the split character, the plugin would treat "A", "B", and "Sea" as separate collection names.

General Settings:

Never delete or modify Kindle collections matching certain words or patterns:
- A failsafe list of Kindle collection names (with prefix/suffix) that will not be modified regardless of the other settings
- "___Currently Reading" - never delete the "___Currently Reading" collection on Kindle - whether it is in Calibre or not
- "\[.*\], Dictionaries" - never delete or overwrite any collection like "[somename]" or named "Dictionaries"
- "\*.*" - never delete or overwrite anything starting with "*" - "*" is a special pattern character
Preserve Kindle-only collections
- Defaults to true - keep collections that won't be modified/created by Calibre
- Calibre-managed collections are any collections that are selected by your customizations, Kindle-managed collections are any that are not selected
- This will make sure the collection will be kept in case the collection is not in the 'never delete' list and Calibre is not updating it
Toolbar icon default menu
- By default the icon on the Calibre toolbar will open a menu to choose what action to run
- You can change this so that clicking on the icon will automatically run an action (Create, Edit, Import, etc.)
- You can always access the menu of other actions using the small down arrow to the right of the icon
Ignore Prefix and Suffix
- Set whether to ignore the prefix and suffix when checking if a Calibre collection matches a Kindle collection
- Only considers non-alphanumeric characters as part of the prefix or suffix
- Useful to allow changing the prefix without creating new collections instead of replacing them
Ignore uppercase/lowercase
- Defaults to ignoring case when checking words/patterns
Fast reboot when you unplug your Kindle
- Only visible if you have the screensaver or font hack installed
- If checked, creates the 'reboot' file to cause the Kindle to quickly reboot once you disconnect the USB cable and load the new collections without restarting the Kindle
Reset timestamps on Collections
- By default the plugin updates the timestamps for each collection in order to force the collections to sort in alphabetical order when you use Sort by Collections or Sort by Most Recent on the Kindle
- Uncheck this option to keep the timestamps set when you last opened the collections on your Kindle

A special note on patterns:

In order to be flexible, the ignore, include, rename and never overwrite/delete fields can support patterns
Patterns use special characters to represent normal letters/numbers (sometimes call regex or regular expression patterns)
For example "." means any character, "*" means 0 or more of the preceding character, ".*" means ignore 0 or more of any character, "^" means start of the text, "$" means end of the text
To use a normal "." in your word/pattern you have to put a "\" in front of it like "\."
A pattern like "^\[.*\]$" will match words that start with "[" with any number of characters up to "]" at the end of the word
Special characters in patterns include: \ | + . * [ ( ? ^ $

Reading List/Book Sync plugin

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Edit Collections Manually on your Kindle using a GUI

You can also use this plugin to manage your collections without entering any data into calibre by selecting Edit Collections to display a simple GUI editor. You can add/remove books to collections, add/remove/rename collections, and see a list of books in collections that you can sort by title/author/date (so it is also a useful way to view your collections).

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Modify Kindle Settings such as Margins and Fonts

You can also set your Kindle's horizontal justification, margin size, and even fonts without installing any hacks using this option.

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Before connecting your Kindle to your PC and changing any of these settings, you must press the Home key on the Kindle to go to the Home page or your changes will be ignored.

Justification

Control whether the text is left justified (ragged right edge) or fully justified (straight left and right edges). Not all books will be affected by this setting depending on how they were created. You can change the setting on the Kindle once you run the plugin and if check 'Allow user justification'.

Margin

Control the amount of space between the edge of the screen and the text. The Kindle allows you to set to a few values (fewest, fewer, default), but you can use the plugin to set other margins (e.g. 20).

Fonts

The Kindle does allow you to use a different font for your books without jailbreaking and without installing a font hack. But you need to follow a few steps so that the plugin can find your font and the Kindle can use your font.

Find some fonts to use.
- The font must have 4 Truetype or OpenType files - one each for Regular, Bold, Italic, and BoldItalic variants
- For example, DroidSerif is popular and free, available from http://www.google.com/webfonts/famil...ly=Droid+Serif (you will need to extract the 4 files from the zip file, and rename DroidSerif.ttf to DroidSerif-Regular.ttf)
Go to the Home screen of your Kindle, then connect your Kindle to your PC
Create the directory "fonts" on your Kindle at the top (e.g. E:\fonts) if it isn't there already
Copy the 4 font files to your Kindle's directory - you must use a specific name format, e.g. if your font is called "DroidSerif", then the 4 files in the font directory must be named as follows (use "-" not "_", and use ".ttf" even if its an OpenType font):

DroidSerif-Regular.ttf
DroidSerif-Bold.ttf
DroidSerif-Italic.ttf
DroidSerif-BoldItalic.ttf
Run the plugin - your font should be visible in the drop down menu for fonts. If it is not visible then check that the 4 file names are correct and in the right directory
Select your font, and click Save
Eject and Restart your Kindle

Notes:

If you get the message "The selected item could not be opened" when you try to open a book, it means the font you selected is not compatible with the Kindle for some reason. Go to the Home screen of your Kindle, reconnect it to your PC, use the plug to select a default font, and restart your Kindle.
You can copy any number of fonts to your Kindle's font directory. The plugin will show a list of all fonts it finds (but each font must have the 4 files with the name pattern above, e.g. MyFont-Regular.ttf, ...). Only 1 font can be used by the Kindle at a time - you will need to use the plugin and restart the Kindle to change fonts.
To change back to a regular font, just use the "Aa" key to select "std". To use your custom font select "alt" (if "alt" is no longer available, use the plugin to reselect your custom font).
The plugin actually copies the 4 font files to the names alt-Regular, alt-Bold, etc. It sets the preferences to use the font name you gave, but when the Kindle restarts its automatically changed to "alt". The Kindle only seems to recognize the "alt" name and not other names, so the plugin just copies your font files to the "alt" name when you select it.
If you have only 3 of the 4 variants of a font, you could copy/rename one of the others, but this does not always work or look right

Font Size

The size of the text on your Kindle will depend on the font you use. You can also set the size directly on your Kindle.

Line Spacing

You can already control this on the Kindle, but you can use this to set more values.

Other

There are various other settings that the plugin will allow you to change, but they have no known effect.

Troubleshooting

Click on the Show buttons in this post to see more details.
If you have questions not answered here, just post - there are too many old/irrelevant posts to read through.

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Restart your Kindle if you don't see the collections you created or changes you made:

On the Kindle press the Home key, then press Menu, select Settings, then press Menu again and select Restart
To change the Kindle to sort By Collections, or By Title, or By Most Recent:
- On the Kindle press the Home key, then go up on the 5-way pad, then go right on the 5-way pad and select a sort method
- Use sort By Collections to see just your collections in alphabetical order. If you open a collection it will move to the top of the list (until you run the plugin again) because the list is actually sorted by most recently accessed. If you only use this view, you can change the prefix text to blank since there are no books to mess up the sort order.
- Use sort By Title to browse your collections in alphabetical order. This isn't affected by what collections/books are most recently opened, but it does show all your books after your collections and requires using prefix text (e.g. "_") to force collections to the top of the list (see Customization details for the sort order of characters)
Use Restore if you've saved collections to the Kindle but want to go back to the previous version
If you delete books from the Kindle using Calibre, restart the Kindle to make sure it updates the collections
If News Feeds, Catalogs, Magazines, Newspapers, or other items are missing from collections check the Examples section for details on how to add them
If you want to automatically create collection names with a comma in them you need to replace the comma with a ";" in Calibre (commas on the Kindle are ok, but semicolons on the Kindle will convert to "," on import to Calibre), - see Import Collections
A collection is either Kindle Managed or Calibre Managed. If you manually edit a Calibre-Managed collection, the collection will just get overwritten the next time you run Create collections. (The Preview report indicates whether collections are Kindle or Calibre managed - its determined by what Customizations you enter)
If the report indicates files aren't found, try resending the file to the Kindle
If the report indicates an invalid Mobi file, try reconverting the file to Mobi format from either the current Mobi file or another format, and resending to the Kindle. And test opening the book to make sure it isn't empty.
Some files on the Kindle are hidden from normal view - usually dictionaries. The plugin can only see these if you manually add them to a collection on the Kindle
When using patterns certain characters are special and must have a "\" in front of them to treat them like normal characters
If you click on the Device icon you can probably see a list of books on the Kindle and what collections they are in (after ejecting/restarting/reconnecting your Kindle) - but NOT for any Amazon purchased books, and sometimes it doesn't seem to work
If you still get more collections/different collections than you expected - check your Calibre templates in Preferences -> Sending books to devices, Preferences -> Plugins -> Device Interface Plugins -> Kindle 2/3 Device Interface, and check any Metadata Plugboards. Calibre can modify a lot of what gets written - so check your settings.
You can use Debug mode to view details about collection creation if you are having issues:
- Select the menu (down arrow icon) attached to the Calibre Preferences icon
- Choose "Restart in debug mode"
- Re-run the plugin and you will see a debug file and filename displayed once you close Calibre
  OR
- run "calibre-debug -g" from the command line ("calibre-debug -g > output.txt" to save it to a file)

Version History:

Requires Calibre 0.8.06 or later

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Donations

If you find this plugin useful, feel free to say thanks with Paypal.

romandesign · 01-27-2011, 05:27 PM

What if I want to only create collections by author? Do I use this:

Quote:

create_kindle_collections_usecolumns = {
"authors": "~ "
}

And can I replace "~" for Authors with something else, like "-", or leave it empty?
-------
Roman Bershadsky
Web designer, Roman Design Toronto web design studio

romandesign · 01-27-2011, 05:34 PM

I'll try to test it later today - I have 500+ books, about a third of those in Russian, so we'll see ho it copes with cyrillic characters. I'll report the result.

-------
Roman Bershadsky
Web designer, Roman Design Toronto web design studio

romandesign · 01-27-2011, 06:38 PM

Initial feedback:
Plugin generally works, no errors displayed. No stray file left without collections (I had three with the othe python script that were always left out). No obvious problems with cyrillic names. I only tried creating collections by authors - I commented out other two options.
Issues:
1. Collections are sorted in apparently random order, no relation to alphabetical order, English and Russian authors mixed together. I can't see any logical order, looks completely random. It should be sorted alphabetically initially (then I think Kindle would put collections you accessed recently on top).
2. For authors that only have one book in my Kindle, collections were still created. Those single books should be left alone, or like the other script there should be an option how many books is enough to create a collection.

nynaevelan · 01-27-2011, 06:53 PM

Hi:

I would like to try this out but I only want my collections created based on the tags info, I do not want to put any extra symbols before or after the name. Is this possible with your plugin? This is the tweak I added, is it correct?

Code:

################################################
# Create Kindle Collections Plugin tweaks
#
# Calibre column names to include in collections, and text to prepend for sorting
create_kindle_collections_usecolumns = {
    "tags"
}
# Collection names or patterns to ignore (e.g. [ "ignorethis", ".*Ignore.*" ]
create_kindle_collections_ignore = [ ]
####################################################

Will this add new books to existing collections?

meme · 01-27-2011, 06:54 PM

Thanks romandesign for trying it out - and posting your feedback. Glad its working for you. Even I got some warnings when running since a couple of my mobi files are corrupted (must get around to regenerating/resending them

)

As you saw, just using "authors": "~ " will only pick up authors, and you can change "~" to "-" or even ""

1. You need to change the sort order on the Kindle to Title - see the Tips section above. At least, it sounds like the issue. This will mean you see all your collections in alphabetical order and then your books. Sorting by Collections is showing the collections in most recently accessed order. Right now I'm not putting a timestamp on the file since I use sort by Title. I'll consider putting a timestamp to sort them initially -but as soon as you access a collection it will jump to the top of the list and mess up your order - which is why sort by Title is nicer.

2. Yes, if you are creating collections by authors then it creates a collection even if there is one other. This makes sense to me - otherwise you won't see your author in your list when you expect to. I'll see if there is demand for this as I don't want to keep adding options unnecessarily.

I'm thinking about providing a gui to edit the collection/ignore names to minimize confusion. We'll see how it goes.

meme · 01-27-2011, 07:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

I would like to try this out but I only want my collections created based on the tags info, I do not want to put any extra symbols before or after the name. Is this possible with your plugin? This is the tweak I added, is it correct?

Code:

create_kindle_collections_usecolumns = {
    "tags"
}

No, you need to use

Code:

create_kindle_collections_usecolumns = {
    "tags":, ""
}

but then if you use sort by Title in Kindle the collections won't be on top (which is why you use "-" instead of "")

Quote:

Will this add new books to existing collections?

No - the script ignores the collections on the Kindle and in fact overwrites the file (so back it up before running).

nynaevelan · 01-27-2011, 07:18 PM

So to make sure I understand, each time it is run it will backup and re-create the collections file?

I am almost afraid to try it, I have over 1200 books on my kindle, all of them in collections but with the other 3 scripts I tried there were over 100 books that I had to put back into collections manually and I although I have backed up the json file and put it back on the kindle, even that doesn't seem to work 100%. I do not know what it is about these books but they will not go into their collections without intervention from me.

I think I am going to try this one on my husband's kindle before venturing into beta-land with mine.

romandesign · 01-27-2011, 07:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by meme

1. You need to change the sort order on the Kindle to Title - see the Tips section above. At least, it sounds like the issue. This will mean you see all your collections in alphabetical order and then your books. Sorting by Collections is showing the collections in most recently accessed order. Right now I'm not putting a timestamp on the file since I use sort by Title. I'll consider putting a timestamp to sort them initially -but as soon as you access a collection it will jump to the top of the list and mess up your order - which is why sort by Title is nicer.

Nope, it doesn't work. If I choose "Title" in sorting options on the top - Kindle does not display any collections at all - just whopping 61 pages of books, one by one. To display collections I have to choose "collections" and I don't see any sorting method just for collections, so all I see is random names all over the place. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to choose sorting method for collections display?

meme · 01-27-2011, 07:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

So to make sure I understand, each time it is run it will backup and re-create the collections file?

Yes, it recreates it each time. But it only backs up the one previous collections file, so if you run the plugin once you still have your original collections file to restore. If you run it twice, it will delete the original backup. So I recommend copying the file to your PC before using the plugin - the backup of the file is just for emergencies.

Quote:

I do not know what it is about these books but they will not go into their collections without intervention from me.

I wonder if they are Amazon books?

Quote:

I think I am going to try this one on my husband's kindle before venturing into beta-land with mine.

Yes, please test it only if you can afford to lose your collections - its still early days for the script and I'd like more testing first.

nynaevelan · 01-27-2011, 07:39 PM

No, all of my books are mobi, so maybe there is corruption in them?? I am not sure, one day I will reconvert them since I took a couple of hours to create an excel spreadsheet of them.

But I will give it a go with my husband's kindle but as my luck would have it I am sure it will work 100% and them when I try it on mine those same problem files with act up.

Oh, by the way we both have kindle 2s, so we will see how it goes.

romandesign · 01-27-2011, 07:40 PM

Question: I could not find the script for the installed plugin in Calibre, so each time I tweak the script I have to uninstall and reinstall the plugin. Is there an easier way?

meme · 01-27-2011, 07:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by romandesign

Nope, it doesn't work. If I choose "Title" in sorting options on the top - Kindle does not display any collections at all - just whopping 61 pages of books, one by one. To display collections I have to choose "collections" and I don't see any sorting method just for collections, so all I see is random names all over the place. Am I doing something wrong?

Ah, this is why developing plugins for the Kindle is so painful/fun

- it never seems to do the same thing for 2 people

Are you sure the collections are not there in the Title display - maybe at the end? Are you using "" as the prefix? Can you recheck your usecolumns setting to make sure its "tags": "" (I left the : off on a previous post) And test using the prefix "_" to force the collections to the top in the Title display just to see if they show up

Quote:

Is there a way to choose sorting method for collections display?

I believe the Collections display sorts by most recently used - if you open a collection it will jump to the top of the list. I don't think this can be changed, though my script could simulate it using fake access dates.

CWatkinsNash · 01-27-2011, 07:43 PM

I'm not Roman, but I'm interested in this and have some of the same concerns he posted. I've been using the script from the other thread for well over a month now so I'm used to its behavior too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by meme

1. You need to change the sort order on the Kindle to Title - see the Tips section above. (snip)I'll consider putting a timestamp to sort them initially -but as soon as you access a collection it will jump to the top of the list and mess up your order - which is why sort by Title is nicer.

I see your point, but having the access time reset option does make it easier to make sure all your expected collections are there. It also, for me, ends up working like this - I have my most accessed collections at the top and the rest alphabetically while in collections-only view. This works because I update my collections at least once a week and I don't go rummaging through my collections much unless I'm reading something - that's one of the many things Calibre is for, so I don't have to rummage through my collections on the Kindle.

Quote:

2. Yes, if you are creating collections by authors then it creates a collection even if there is one other. This makes sense to me - otherwise you won't see your author in your list when you expect to. I'll see if there is demand for this as I don't want to keep adding options unnecessarily.

You can add a +1 to the demand for this. Honestly, the plugin isn't much use to me unless I can tweak the minimum number for a collection to be created. One reason is because I don't want to have a series collection unless I have at least three books for that series, and I don't want collections for my "low volume" authors. I can get around this by adding an author tag or creating a custom column to handle it, but I'd rather just stick with the script that's already configured that way.

Quote:

I'm thinking about providing a gui to edit the collection/ignore names to minimize confusion. We'll see how it goes.

That would be awesome. If you could put the most common options into a Plugin Configuration GUI, this plugin could be arguably the most versatile, user-friendly collection management option available.

Please don't take my comments as meaning "the script is better" because I'd much rather use the plugin if more of the same functionality was able to be implemented, such as that already mentioned as well as an option to run it in update instead of rebuild mode. I really don't want to have to stick my random non-modified Amazon files back in collections any more often than I have to. Those are the things that would make it useful to me. I think it's great that you've done this much - this is a plugin that many have been waiting on.

I just did a bunch of updates to my library and rebuilt my collections yesterday, so I really don't want to test the plugin right now. I'm collectioned-out at the moment.

But I will give it a run this weekend. Does it produce a job log?

One more thing - in your first post (I think) you stated that you could replace the collection prefix character ("~", etc) with any text. This has not been my experience. For example, "> " will show up as gibberish on the Kindle, or at least it did when I've tried it in the past. I have no idea what other characters produce similar results. If I get ambitious this weekend maybe I'll test a bunch of characters and see what else works or doesn't.

meme · 01-27-2011, 07:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

No, all of my books are mobi, so maybe there is corruption in them??

The script checks for MOBI errors - I get a few of them for some of my corrupt files - but I can't be certain.

Quote:

Oh, by the way we both have kindle 2s, so we will see how it goes.

I only have a Kindle 3, so let me know how it goes.

01-27-2011, 06:53 PM	#5
nynaevelan eBook Junkie Posts: 1,526 Karma: 1464018 Join Date: May 2010 Location: USA Device: Kindle Fire 2020, Kindle PW2	Hi: I would like to try this out but I only want my collections created based on the tags info, I do not want to put any extra symbols before or after the name. Is this possible with your plugin? This is the tweak I added, is it correct? Code: ################################################ # Create Kindle Collections Plugin tweaks # # Calibre column names to include in collections, and text to prepend for sorting create_kindle_collections_usecolumns = { "tags" } # Collection names or patterns to ignore (e.g. [ "ignorethis", ".Ignore." ] create_kindle_collections_ignore = [ ] #################################################### Will this add new books to existing collections?

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01-27-2011, 05:34 PM	#3
romandesign Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Toronto Device: Kindle 3	I'll try to test it later today - I have 500+ books, about a third of those in Russian, so we'll see ho it copes with cyrillic characters. I'll report the result. ------- Roman Bershadsky Web designer, Roman Design Toronto web design studio

01-27-2011, 06:38 PM	#4
romandesign Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Toronto Device: Kindle 3	Initial feedback: Plugin generally works, no errors displayed. No stray file left without collections (I had three with the othe python script that were always left out). No obvious problems with cyrillic names. I only tried creating collections by authors - I commented out other two options. Issues: 1. Collections are sorted in apparently random order, no relation to alphabetical order, English and Russian authors mixed together. I can't see any logical order, looks completely random. It should be sorted alphabetically initially (then I think Kindle would put collections you accessed recently on top). 2. For authors that only have one book in my Kindle, collections were still created. Those single books should be left alone, or like the other script there should be an option how many books is enough to create a collection.

01-27-2011, 06:54 PM	#6
meme Sigil developer Posts: 1,274 Karma: 1101600 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: UK Device: Kindle PW, K4 NT, K3, Kobo Touch	Thanks romandesign for trying it out - and posting your feedback. Glad its working for you. Even I got some warnings when running since a couple of my mobi files are corrupted (must get around to regenerating/resending them ) As you saw, just using "authors": "~ " will only pick up authors, and you can change "~" to "-" or even "" 1. You need to change the sort order on the Kindle to Title - see the Tips section above. At least, it sounds like the issue. This will mean you see all your collections in alphabetical order and then your books. Sorting by Collections is showing the collections in most recently accessed order. Right now I'm not putting a timestamp on the file since I use sort by Title. I'll consider putting a timestamp to sort them initially -but as soon as you access a collection it will jump to the top of the list and mess up your order - which is why sort by Title is nicer. 2. Yes, if you are creating collections by authors then it creates a collection even if there is one other. This makes sense to me - otherwise you won't see your author in your list when you expect to. I'll see if there is demand for this as I don't want to keep adding options unnecessarily. I'm thinking about providing a gui to edit the collection/ignore names to minimize confusion. We'll see how it goes.

01-27-2011, 07:18 PM	#8
nynaevelan eBook Junkie Posts: 1,526 Karma: 1464018 Join Date: May 2010 Location: USA Device: Kindle Fire 2020, Kindle PW2	So to make sure I understand, each time it is run it will backup and re-create the collections file? I am almost afraid to try it, I have over 1200 books on my kindle, all of them in collections but with the other 3 scripts I tried there were over 100 books that I had to put back into collections manually and I although I have backed up the json file and put it back on the kindle, even that doesn't seem to work 100%. I do not know what it is about these books but they will not go into their collections without intervention from me. I think I am going to try this one on my husband's kindle before venturing into beta-land with mine.

01-27-2011, 07:39 PM	#11
nynaevelan eBook Junkie Posts: 1,526 Karma: 1464018 Join Date: May 2010 Location: USA Device: Kindle Fire 2020, Kindle PW2	No, all of my books are mobi, so maybe there is corruption in them?? I am not sure, one day I will reconvert them since I took a couple of hours to create an excel spreadsheet of them. But I will give it a go with my husband's kindle but as my luck would have it I am sure it will work 100% and them when I try it on mine those same problem files with act up. Oh, by the way we both have kindle 2s, so we will see how it goes.

01-27-2011, 07:40 PM	#12
romandesign Member Posts: 14 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2011 Location: Toronto Device: Kindle 3	Question: I could not find the script for the installed plugin in Calibre, so each time I tweak the script I have to uninstall and reinstall the plugin. Is there an easier way?

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