Description Format Breaking Book View Display

[MsBarrows]

Bought a series of books today and noticed Calibre was displaying the information in the books' info panes strangely - the image of the cover was there, the comments/description blurb was there, but all the other usual information - title, author, series, tags, format, etc. - was not displaying.

Tried editing the book info (moving series name & number from end of title to actual fields, tagging to my own preferences, etc), still not displaying properly.

Updated from Calibre 6.4.0 to 6.10.0, checked again, still not displaying properly.

Went to see if there was weird HTML in the description, noticed the description was one long paragraph with <br><br> instead of </p><p>. Tried changing that, weirdly enough that fixed it, though as I've had books with line breaks rather than paragraph breaks in their description before and it did NOT break the proper display of information, I was reasonably sure that wasn't the true cause.

Re-imported one of the books and did further testing, as soon as I made ANY change to the description (remove a space, add a word, etc) and click "Ok" the display corrects. So there was clearly something weird about the description's coding that was behind the temporary breakage.

Checked the metadata.opf file inside the AZW3 both pre- and post-fixing the book (fixed by inserting the word FIX). Difference spotted:

PRE: <dc:description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;!--StartFragment--&gt;&lt;em&gt;A lord in danger.
POST: <dc:description>&lt;div&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;FIX A lord in danger.

PRE: both going to die.&lt;!--EndFragment--&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</dc:description>
POST: both going to die.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;</dc:description>

As far I can tell, the remainder of the file is identical, so it would appear to be the Start & End Fragment comments that are causing the display breakage. Don't know if that's helpful to prevent similar formatting from breaking the display in future, but do with it what you want.

The book series in question is KJ Charles' "A Charm Of Magpies" trilogy, as purchased in AZW3 format from Amazon. I've extracted and attached the unfixed version of metadata.opf from the first book (The Magpie Lord).

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every alternate Friday.

 status fixreleased