how to stop calibre from moving my "a" and "the" in titles?

[burnafterreading]

a lot of my book titles use words such as "a" and "the" at the beginning of the title. calibre keeps moving them around, to "title, the", or "funny title, a". it's annoying. how do I stop it from doing that? so far I've seen it butcher 20 of my books which I have to redo, and I have a few hundred still left to even begin to clean up.

I tried the 'articles' tweak by simply removing the words from the eng() bit, but it still does it. supposedly calibre is VERY configurable?

[theducks]

Butcher?

I consider Library order is the proper way. (and so did my High school Librarian)

There are tweaks to control if and How in Preferences: Tweaks
searching on Library order should find all of them

[JSWolf]

Go to...

Preferences | Tweaks | Control formatting of title and series when used in templates

Then change save_template_title_series_sorting to be ='strictly_alphabetic'

That will keep the articles such as A, The, etc. in front when you save to disk.

ID: save_template_title_series_sorting

Control how title and series names are formatted when saving to disk/sending to device. The behavior depends on the field being processed. If processing title, then if this tweak is set to 'library_order', the title will be replaced with title_sort. If it is set to 'strictly_alphabetic', then the title will not be changed. If processing series, then if set to 'library_order', articles such as 'The' and 'An' will be moved to the end. If set to 'strictly_alphabetic', the series will be sent without change. For example, if the tweak is set to library_order, "The Lord of the Rings" will become "Lord of the Rings, The". If the tweak is set to strictly_alphabetic, it would remain "The Lord of the Rings". Note that the formatter function raw_field will return the base value for title and series regardless of the setting of this tweak.

[burnafterreading]

Originally Posted by theducks

Butcher?

I consider Library order is the proper way. (and so did my High school Librarian)

There are tweaks to control if and How in Preferences: Tweaks
searching on Library order should find all of them

haha! well, teachers aren't always logical. when i speak, i say "The Title Of My Book", not "Title Of My Book, The". i prefer to sort & name my books the same way that i say them - it's more natural and consequently proper (to me) - so invariably i'm changing everything to make them follow the "John Smith - The Title" format.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Go to...

Preferences | Tweaks | Control formatting of title and series when used in templates

Then change save_template_title_series_sorting to be ='strictly_alphabetic'

That will keep the articles such as A, The, etc. in front when you save to disk.

thanks! that sounds like exactly what i need. i'll do it as soon as i get back home. it just sucks that doing a search for "a" or "the" in the tutorial or help file is as useful as searching for a blank space...

[JSWolf]

I had the same problem and I found the answer in a thread here that I lucked out upon finding.

[FacetiousKnave]

Lucky me I found this thread!

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by burnafterreading

haha! well, teachers aren't always logical. when i speak, i say "The Title Of My Book", not "Title Of My Book, The". i prefer to sort & name my books the same way that i say them - it's more natural and consequently proper (to me) - so invariably i'm changing everything to make them follow the "John Smith - The Title" format.

And when 40% of your books are filed under A or An or The, you begin to appreciate moving common articles from the start of the title sort if not the title itself.

One horrible example being when a friend of mine was on maternity leave, the person who filled in while she was off screwed up their filing system totally. Over 90% of their customers had names starting with The (The Ministry of Education, The City of North Vancouver, The District of North Vancouver, The Regional District of Nanaimo, The Municipality of Canoe, etc.), so you can imagine the mess when she got back and was trying to look for a file. Admittedly, the filing standard was to use the locale name followed by the type so North Vancouver, The City of would be filed before North Vancouver, The District of and so on instead of just moving the article to end of the sort field.