title_series_sorting not working in 0.7.23?

[kiwidude]

Hi all, new user of Calibre so apologies in advance if I have erred but...

I have changed in preferences the title_series_sorting to 'strictly_alphabetic', because I am one of 'those' people whose brain get's annoyed seeing titles starting with "The" listed in places other than "T" when I sort alphabetically...

However it seems to make no difference to me whether I set the tweak to 'library_order' or 'strictly_alphabetic' - it always behaves as 'library_order'.

Is this something that got 'broken' or am I not understanding the intent of this setting? I am just trying to browse the collection in the listview.

Many thanks for your help.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I have changed in preferences the title_series_sorting to 'strictly_alphabetic', because I am one of 'those' people whose brain get's annoyed seeing titles starting with "The" listed in places other than "T" when I sort alphabetically...

However it seems to make no difference to me whether I set the tweak to 'library_order' or 'strictly_alphabetic' - it always behaves as 'library_order'.

The tweak controls new entries, not old ones. You need to update old ones after setting the tweak to get them to change. You need to force calibre to do an update to the metadata of every book. Quoting Charles:

There are three general ways to do that.

1) Select all the books, then right-click and select 'Edit metadata individually'. As each box opens, hit return without changing anything. The title sort value will be updated. If you have a lot of books, you will get tired of hitting return.

2) Double-click in a title and hit return. Updates the title to what it was before, but applying the tweak. Again, if you have a lot of books, this method will be annoying.

3) If your author_sort values are all computed from the author values, then you can force the recomputation in one step by selecting all your books, hitting 'E' to get to bulk metadata edit, checking the 'Automatically set author sort' box, and pressing OK. Calibre will change the author sort to what it already is, recomputing the title sort in the process.

[kiwidude]

Thanks very much for that explanation, I did not realise it was not retrospectively applied.

However while options (1) and (2) for editing the title do indeed work, as quoted it is very painful to find and fix them individually in a very large library. I cannot however get option (3) to work - it does not seem to be recomputing the title sort when a bulk edit just has the checkbox for author sort selected on it?

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Thanks very much for that explanation, I did not realise it was not retrospectively applied.

However while options (1) and (2) for editing the title do indeed work, as quoted it is very painful to find and fix them individually in a very large library. I cannot however get option (3) to work - it does not seem to be recomputing the title sort when a bulk edit just has the checkbox for author sort selected on it?

I assume you left everything blank, except the author_sort selection? Charles will have to step in here, as he's the sort/tweak expert. I quoted his post on this subject (your problem is common), but I've never tried it myself.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Starson17

I assume you left everything blank, except the author_sort selection?

Yes that is correct, when the dialog pops up the only thing I did was select the checkbox. Maybe that solution has been "optimised out" in a later release. Apologies if this was a common question, I did do a search for title_series_sorting before positing and didn't find anything relevant. Having re-read the comment in the Tweaks section of the app I can see I missed the point about it requiring editing afterwards, just shows you can lead a horse to water...

Manually scrolling down and editing one by one, a one-off minor inconvenience even if there are thousands to work through.

[chaley]

The bulk metadata author_sort method does in fact recompute the title_sort. However, the recent 'maintain the selection' changes caused the GUI not to be updated. Simply exit and restart calibre, and you will find that the title_sorts have changed.

At least, they did for me.

[pghaworth]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Manually scrolling down and editing one by one, a one-off minor inconvenience even if there are thousands to work through.

This is true. I had to do it and it was a huge pain. Looks great now tho'.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Apologies if this was a common question,

Apologies are not required. I wasn't indicating that you should have known the answer or been able to find it easily with a search. In fact, it was the opposite - I was commenting that you were not alone in thinking that changing the tweak would change the sort order retroactively.