[MacOS] Save question marks and ellipses on disk

[Yako]

Hi all. I have not been able to find the right thread because I do not speak English (this is a translation from Spanish) and I have a question that I hope will not be repeated. In the forum in Spanish I have not been able to solve it.

I work with Caliber for Mac and I want to save my caliber library on disk and use this simple save template:

{authors}/{series}/{title}/{title} - {authors}

Does the saved as I like it and goes almost all good except with the interrogations (?) And ellipsis (...). The problem is that as caliber cleans and cleans some special characters of titles, such as bars and some others, when I try to save a title with question marks or ellipses (there are!) I replaced them with underscores, for example the title :

"Hello? Friends... - John Kindle.mobi" would keep it as "Hello_ Friends_ . John Kindle.mobi".

What do I have to modify in the template so that this does not happen? Thank you.

[theducks]

You can't.
The reason Calibre does this is because those characters are not valid for file names.
Additionaly:
? is the wildcard for a single character match.
* is the match anything wild card.
: is a special character to seperate devices eg C:, COM1:

[BetterRed]

@Yako - how is the disk you are saving to formatted?

If its a thumb drive it may be FAT32 in which case the characters .|\?*<":>/ are reserved. Calibre will substitute an underscore '_' for those when you Save to (a FAT formatted) Disk.

And is the ellipsis a real one or three dots? Even on Windows you can use a real ellipsis, but not three dots.

BR

[DNSB]

Since calibre is designed to work on multiple operating systems, it avoids using special characters from any of the supported operating systems. You might want to check Wikipedia's Filename entry with attention to the Reserved characters and words section on.

[Yako]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Yako - how is the disk you are saving to formatted?

If its a thumb drive it may be FAT32 in which case the characters .|\?*<":>/ are reserved. Calibre will substitute an underscore '_' for those when you Save to (a FAT formatted) Disk.

And is the ellipsis a real one or three dots? Even on Windows you can use a real ellipsis, but not three dots.

BR

No. I work in mac environment and I save in external hard drive connected by usb, yes, but the disk is not formatted in Fat 32, it is in Mac format. The ellipsis are three real points and two of them transforms them into a script low and the other leaves it like this (...) (_.)

[Yako]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Since calibre is designed to work on multiple operating systems, it avoids using special characters from any of the supported operating systems. You might want to check Wikipedia's Filename entry with attention to the Reserved characters and words section on.

I take a look. Thank you

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Yako

No. I work in mac environment and I save in external hard drive connected by usb, yes, but the disk is not formatted in Fat 32, it is in Mac format. The ellipsis are three real points and two of them transforms them into a script low and the other leaves it like this (...) (_.)

_. is what happens on Windows with dot, dot, dot

You can use the MacOS Disk Utility to find out which file system the drive is formatted to use -

I thought calibre's Save to Disk conformed to the target file system in respect to allowable characters, file name lengths etc. And in HFS+ anything but NUL is allowable. My Linux laptop died so I only have Windows.

What happens if you do a Save to Disk to the system drive.

[kovidgoyal]

Use an actual ellipsis character instead of three dots and you will be fine.

[Yako]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

_. is what happens on Windows with dot, dot, dot

You can use the MacOS Disk Utility to find out which file system the drive is formatted to use -

I thought calibre's Save to Disk conformed to the target file system in respect to allowable characters, file name lengths etc. And in HFS+ anything but NUL is allowable. My Linux laptop died so I only have Windows.

What happens if you do a Save to Disk to the system drive.

USB external physical volume • Mac OS Plus (uppercase / small, with registration)

This is the external hard drive format where I keep

APFS volume • APFS

And this is the internal disk format of the mac

I tried to save in the intern and the exact same thing happens:
? = _
¿ = _
...a = _.a
a... = a._
! ¡ = ! ¡ (This is fine)

I think it has no solution and I do not want to bother anymore. Thanks for bothering to answer me.

[Yako]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Use an actual ellipsis character instead of three dots and you will be fine.

What is a real ellipsis carater? or which could be used to simulate the three points (...) is used in Spanish, I do not know if in English these three points are used.
The fact is that books have titles like this for example:

¿Amnesia ...?.mobi and returns this _Amnesia_._.mobi

The truth is that writers title books as they want, of course, and we can not do anything with that. I have more than a thousand books with a mixture of these types of characters that are going to be saved badly.
What strikes me is that it has imported them well with all the correct characters in my language (es)

[Yako]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Use an actual ellipsis character instead of three dots and you will be fine.

By the way, greetings to the creator of Caliber. Thank you for creating it.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Yako

What is a real ellipsis carater? or which could be used to simulate the three points (...) is used in Spanish, I do not know if in English these three points are used.

This: …

[BetterRed]

FWIW - on Windows I can save this book:



With this template {authors} - {title},

And get this:



FTR the library filename is: _Hello_. World! - Anat Admati.epub

I must admit to being confused: I've always thought file naming rules were less restrictive on MacOS than on Windows because of its Unix heritage. Windows inherited its conventions from DOS/CPM/RT-11.

But I also thought Apple's file system was known as HFS+ - is APFS just a new badge for HFS+, or something entirely different, like MS's ReFS.

BR

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Yako

What is a real ellipsis carater? or which could be used to simulate the three points (...) is used in Spanish, I do not know if in English these three points are used.
The fact is that books have titles like this for example:

¿Amnesia ...?.mobi and returns this _Amnesia_._.mobi

The truth is that writers title books as they want, of course, and we can not do anything with that. I have more than a thousand books with a mixture of these types of characters that are going to be saved badly.
What strikes me is that it has imported them well with all the correct characters in my language (es)

&helip; (don't ask me how to find this in the Windows character map tool )

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

&helip; (don't ask me how to find this in the Windows character map tool )

My AHK Script to type an ellipsis in Windows -- anytime, anywhere.

^!.::             ;ctrl+alt+. - hat and bang signify ctrl and alt
Send …
return

BR