Rosebriars and ink

My friend limiculous asked me to walk her through how I set up a custom column in calibre for comments on downloaded fic (which I did because I discovered that whoops, puting notes in the summary means they're wiped if the fic updates because the summary resets, and I don't know how many notes I lost before I noticed this, WHOOPS), and I figured I'd put it up here too, in case it would be useful to someone else as well.

The comments look like this:


(Comment selected for its utter blandness as an example, because this post isn't about the contents of the comments.)

And now, how you get one of those!

First, right click on the column header. You'll get a right click menu, wherein you select 'Add your own columns'.


The window you get looks like this, and you hit the + button to add a new one:


You want to set up the new column about like this, though obviously you can change the title and all as you like. If you set it to plain text instead of HTML, the comments display in monospace in the metadata pane, and I found that really jarring, so I have them as HTML even though I have no desire to put any actual HTML in them.


Back in the add your own columns window, make sure the tickbox in the 'Column header' column is ticked if you want to be able to see comments in the general display rather than just in the metadata pane--which also lets you sort by comments, which I use to group together all the fics I've left comments on if I want to look at just them.

And that's it! Boom, custom calibre column to keep notes to yourself in. (Obviously you could also leave comments on actual books, if you read those and not just fic like I do of late.) (If anyone would like to know anything else about using calibre for downloaded fic--I've got mine set up so it can scrape urls for fics to update from email notifications, for instance, and to tag every downloaded fic with 'fanfiction' so I can have it in a virtual library just for fic--well, you can see all my virtual libraries up top in the tabs in the first screenshot--this sentence has gone on for a very long time and the point is I'm happy to do other mini tutorials if anyone would like.)