By mangling, you’re just referring to the folder/file names in the Calibre Library folder, right? The actual metadata in the app/book are fine?

Likely referring to that, yeah. And yes, the metadata is fine - but it’s a joke that I can’t find any Japanese books I own on my file system because Calibre’s author has renamed them to something that makes sense neither in Japanese, nor English, nor even Chinese.

It’s particularly dumb as it will have taken even more work on his part to map the characters to pīnyīn than it would’ve to just preserve the actual titles.

With a modern filesystem, absolutely. With FAT32 that was prevalent when Calibre was first released in 2006... I'm not so sure.

Good lord, no. Does Calibre do that? My greatest fear is having to build bad things like that for backwards compatibility, because Calibre would require it.

While I haven't tested non-ASCII titles, there is no reason it shouldn't support it. I'm planning on doing some perf testing today and I'll make sure I test global names.

I’ve been caught out by that recently - it’s not considered a bug! With the advised workaround changing Calibre’s interface into Japanese?!