Alphabetize A

When I alphabetize by title in my library I've noticed that A Confederacy of Dunces is being treated as if it begins with the letter A. In all other cases, the initial articles (a, an, the) are ignored for alphabetization, but not here. I've tried changing the title of my book to strike the A, and it works correctly, but adding the A back in sorts it back to the A books. Is there something about this particular book that's causing that? The sort field next to title is blank.

You appear to have the sort character for that book set as 1, rather than blank, which is causing it to sort under "A".

>2 Nevov:
I don't think I do. You mean the field next to title in the Edit My Book screen? The field appears blank to me, though I admit I don't quite understand how that field works. The book isn't all the way at the top of my list because the books that begin with numbers are still above it. And changing the title to simply "Confederacy of Dunces" moves it properly under C.

If you want it to sort under C the number in sort character needs to be 3.

>4 Aquila: That does work. But none of my other books use the sort character field at all. Why does this book require it, but, for example, A Clockwork Orange went naturally to C with the sort field blank?

On further investigation, I also found a handful of other titles that are sorted under T for "The" even though the grand majority of my other titles ignore "the" for alphabetization. For example, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer https://www.librarything.com/work/184603/book/221792571 is under T not W.

If you look, most of your books with titles starting with 'The' have the sort character correctly at 5. That is, they sort on the fifth character (t h e - W). Any titles that don't sort correctly need that set. If I sort your catalogue by sort character, you have hundreds of books with sort character 5.

>7 MarthaJeanne: Huh, interesting. I will check that. This is mostly a testament to my ignorance of that field, then. Thank you all!

I just blanked one of my "The" books out, and it did set the sort character to 1, when I expected it would go to 5. Similar when doing it on an "A" book, I expected it to go to 3 but it went to 1.

So it possibly is a bug, if we expect that selecting it to blank will revert to default logic, whereas if all it does is default to 1 every time.

Setting it to blank should default to 1, it's the only logic that they are sorting by

>9 Nevov: Blank is the same as (start). The default logic kicks in when saving/adding a book by changing the value to what if needs to be (depends on where/how you save). When you set it to blank, you are telling the system you want it to count all characters. So no bug here I’d think.

When you add a book through Manual Entry, leaving it blank causes a 3 to get filled in for "A", a 5 for "The", etc. It's comparing to that, that makes this seem unintended/a bug, if the edit book page doesn't apply the same rules/logic as the add book.

>11 AnnieMod: (start) is the option that gets 1 into the field.

Edit: Think we've cross-posted :-)

>12 Nevov: But we need a way to say it to 1 once in a while when the automatic setting gets it wrong (i.e. a book in a language where The means Tea).

And call me weird but I set it to 1 on all my books.

>14 bnielsen: And all the "A is for " alphabet books.

I've noticed when adding books through the Android app that articles aren't ignored for sorting by default as they used to be (at least for English-language titles). Titles default for sorting on the first character and the sort needs to be edited by hand. This change seems to have coincided with the new mobile design for the book editing screen.

Closing as not a bug.

>14 bnielsen: we need a way to say it to 1 once in a while when the automatic setting gets it wrong (i.e. a book in a language where The means Tea).

We do have that, it's what the (start) option in the menu is for. :-)
Choosing (start) makes it go to 1. Which makes sense as 1 is the first character, the start of the title.

I can understand that if it's been like this for years, users might have it learned by habit as "blank means 1" but that's not what blank does on the Add Books page, so it seems a bug if it does a different thing when editing.

I'll reopen:
The bug is that when editing a book, choosing a blank sort character causes it to set the sort character as 1.
It should be triggering the same logic loop that happens on the Add Book page when the sort character is left blank, where the site follows some rules to decide what character to sort on.

>18 Nevov: If it's working as intended, it's not a bug even if you think it should work different. A more appropriate venue for your request would be Recommended Site Improvements.

>19 rosalita:
> If it's working as intended, it's not a bug even if you think it should work different.

I'm saying it's not working as intended. :-)

Edit: quote fix

The intent is to have it infer the start character only when a book is entered. To have it make the inference on edit would mean that everytime you edit the title of a book like A is for Alibi it would pop back to 3 and you'd have to reset it. For non-English users it would probably be intolerable.

>21 jjwilson61: Exactly. As I said, working as intended.

>21 jjwilson61:
I don't think that situation arises - because it's never blank when you go into edit a book. Indeed if you try to blank it out directly in your catalog it errors saying that only numbers are accepted. Upon adding it in the first place, the blank gets converted.

>23 Nevov: That is simply not true. I just added a book and when I went to edit, the sort field was blank -- the book title is Murder in the Ball Park.

I added another book, The Appeal. When I edited the book, the sort field was set (properly) at 5.

>23 Nevov: That’s not true though. A lot of my books have it as empty on edit - either because I left it that way or because they were added before the sort character was introduced or because they did not need the adjustment so the auto-setting left it empty. Plus You can set it to the empty from the Dropdown.

>23 Nevov: >24 rosalita: >25 AnnieMod:
Right, I'm on board, not a bug and re-closed.
It's more that the add books does a special thing, and as a one-time offer will set a customised sort character for the specially defined cases.
The rest of the time leaving it blank actually does leave it blank, not set it to 1 (which I falsely thought).

What misled me to that was because in our catalog view, any books that have a blank sort character don't actually show empty in the field, but show as 1 (presumably done on purpose to not have empties together sorted in their own section, and because the add books logic wasn't triggered it's a reasonably safe assumption most of the time). I guess you only encounter wrong cases if you have later changed the title yourself (ie. you are to blame!).

And if we are editing a book we just have to know that blanking always gets treated as 1, different from when adding, and if that wants changing, RSI. Thanks for your patience.

>26 Nevov: It's more that the add books does a special thing, and as a one-time offer will set a customised sort character for the specially defined cases.

Yes, I think that's the key point exactly, and probably should be included in whatever wiki page discusses the Add Books process.

>26 Nevov: Part of what makes this so confusing is that sometimes it depends if you edit the title from the edit page or from the catalog view (the latter had never triggered the special changes - the edit from the Edit page has been temperamental historically - aka it changed a few times what it used to do) :) So there is that.

And then there are the pre-feature books which have their own issues.