[GUI Plugin] Manage Series

[kiwidude]

This plugin offers a GUI allowing you to quickly create and edit your series column values for your selected books using either drag/drop or keyboard shortcuts. With the current deprecation of various Calibre series metadata sources (except when using the Goodreads metadata plugin) users may find the need for more manual editing of their series information.

It is intended as a convenience alternative to the editing the series column in the library view, where the [] square brackets must be very carefully edited within. This can get painfully repetitive particularly for renumbering large series.

You may also find it more convenient than the careful mouse selection ordering required by the bulk metadata edit dialog (which also does not allow for .1 type series values).

Main Features:

• Supports both the built-in Calibre series column and optional custom series columns.
• Use Alt+Up/Down arrow keys or drag/drop to move books up/down the list.
• Use Alt+Left/Right to change the indent level to number books at .1 or .01 etc, such as when you have related short stories.
• Lock series indexes when renumbering to intentionally allow for gaps with missing books.
• Remove books from the list if they are not to be considered part of the series renumbering.
• Option to add empty books to fill in your series gaps.
• Ability to edit the titles and publication dates.
• Right-click options to sort by original series index, series names or by publication date.
• Right-click options to perform Search the Internet type browser launching to likely useful series information websites, such as FantasticFiction, Goodreads, Google and Wikipedia.

Special Notes:

• Help Documentation
• Change History
• Requires Calibre v2.0.0 or later.

Paypal Donations:

• If you find this or any of my other plugins useful please feel free to show your appreciation. I have spent many hundreds of unpaid hours in their development and support so any encouragement for me to continue is appreciated!
  

[kiwidude]

Changes in v1.1:

• Rewritten for new plugin infrastructure in Calibre 0.7.53
• Change to use OrderedDict from collections (deprecated code in Calibre)

[hrynkiw]

I've been a happy user of the Manage Series plugin for about a week now.

The one thing that I've found to be a bit of a usability issue is adding an empty book record and having to go back to the regular view (usually Author) in order to change the title of the empty book from "Unknown" to the actual title.

Wait... before you start replying, finish reading.

So I came here to suggest an "edit title" enhancement and while reading through the list of features I see "Ability to edit the titles". I'm delighted it's already there, but perplexed as to why I haven't been able to get it to work. I know I've tried clicking on the book titles to try and change them from within the Manage Series window, and that hasn't worked for me.

What am I missing?

[kiwidude]

Double-click in the title to begin an Edit.

This was the original behaviour in Calibre in the Library view as well (and what I use), though nowadays it is no longer the default. I guess what I could do in a future version is try to use the same value from the tweak related to this, and change it to match your Library view editing.

[hrynkiw]

So all I'm missing is the second click? D'oh!

Thank-you.

(Edited to add): Yup, works as advertised. Thanks KiwiDude, my series editing just got an order of magnitude easier.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I guess what I could do in a future version is try to use the same value from the tweak related to this, and change it to match your Library view editing.

With a group project, it's often hard to match the part of the code you're working on with the parts being updated by others. At one point Charles or Kovid added a tweak to control what Calibre considered to be an article of speech. It had previously been hard coded as English "the" and "a," etc. I hard coded in the same articles in the automerge fuzzy matching routine and didn't notice the new tweak that had been added until many months later.

[kiwidude]

@Starson17 - totally dude, the circle of stuff I know about in Calibre vs what I don't know makes it tough to keep up with.

In this particular case it was just selfishness/laziness on my part . As I posted above I am a "double-click to edit" kind of guy, all my plugins which have grids like Search the Internet and Open With all work this way. So supporting other edit modes such as what become Calibre's default wasn't very high on my priority list. I'll take a look at it one day, I just need to find Kovid's code to see what he does and replicate it in all the relevant plugins. I would guess meme has the same issue in his Kindle Collections plugin grids, though maybe he was more proactive about this than me

[meme]

Me more proactive than you? Don't think so

I see I need to double click on my customization form. Not sure if that's my coding or my Calibre default. I haven't seen anyone comment on it yet, so for now I'll leave it as is...

[kiwidude]

Haha, wondered if you would feel your ears burning

It is the Qt default behaviour, not something you have coded. It's just a line or two of code to make it behave otherwise IIRC. I only know this because I remember begging Kovid to keep support for the legacy behaviour including proving how little code it was

[Calibrefan]

Thanks kiwidude, very useful plugin!

[kiwidude]

Cheers Calibrefan, glad you like it.

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Support skinning of icons by putting them in a plugin name subfolder of local resources/images
• Ensure that encoding for launching website url ignores failures.

[vaderag]

Great plugin, thanks.

I wondered whether there might be a way for you to incorporate the solution in this post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...5&postcount=21

(from this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96765)

Basically would mean changing the dates on those files to match the order that's set? This way it would mean we could keep the order on the kindle?

What do you think!?

[kiwidude]

Hi vaderag,

Ok, before I discuss changing the plugin, let's briefly clarify the requirement.

Firstly the thread you referenced is an "old" one, things move fast in Calibre world. Since that time meme developed the Kindle Collections plugin, and that offers a very easy way to create collections per author or other criteria.

Now if I understand the "issue" correctly, it is that on a Kindle if you sort by Author, the results are displayed in reverse publication date order (most recent first). So your request and that thread above is based around fudging the publication date so that the books will appear in series order descending, rather than the last in the series at the top. Have I got all that part correct?

The approach I and many others have taken is to not use Sort by Author on the Kindle. Once you get more than a page or two of books it is pretty unmanageable anyways. So instead we use sort by Title, and have a collection per author. We name the collections with a special prefix like _ or ~ to ensure that alphabetically as far as a title sort is concerned they appear at the top of the list. So in my case I create collections using meme's Kindle Collections plugin based on the author sort field in Calibre, with a ~ prefix, and a very special custom collection called _Reading_ which will always appear at the very top that I add the current book I am reading into.

How does this help you with series you may ask? Well the trick is that you want the series name to appear in the title of the book, so that Wheel of Time 01 - xxx is displayed before Wheel of Time 02 - xxx etc. This was suggested on that thread above.

What I didn't see mentioned was the best way to approach that. That is to use a metadata plugboard (and not hack your title name inside Calibre which is a crude suggestion some people do). So once your plugboard is setup, when you send books to your Kindle the series name/number is prefixed before the title of the book when displayed on the Kindle. Note this doesn't affect how your books look in Calibre, nor the filename of the books, just the internal metadata stored with the MOBI files that the Kindle reads to display on the screen.

So why do all this? It means that you don't ever need to muck around with publication dates, you can keep them at their genuine values and not "wreck" them by putting them in the opposite order. If a new book comes out in a series, you don't ever have to fiddle with it's date either.

Does that all make sense, or are there reasons why you don't want to use collections. It just sounds the "wrong" approach to me to try to muck around with the publication date. Instead it is just one click on the Kindle Collections plugin every time you send new books to your Kindle, and then a Kindle restart to have the new collections file displayed, job done...

[kiwidude]

Changes in this release:

• Change webbrowser launching to use Calibre's wrapper for the default browser for better Linux support.