[GUI Plugin] Generate Cover

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by nevermiffed

I just finished getting all my fanfic onto Calibre, and I am trying to get the summary onto the cover of the books. I have the generate cover plugin and while I can have the summary on the cover, it has a lot of HTML with it. How can I make it, well, not have that?

I was trying to make a custom column for summary/comments that would edit those out, but I have no clue what I'm doing here.

I was mostly using these posts as a guide

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=331027
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=4143924

If you are setup correctly, you can send your summery/blurb to your Kobo and have it be easily readable. Doing the blurb via the cover might not be all that readable when the cover is a thumbnail.

To check if you are setup correctly, go to My Books and then pick a book. press the ... and choose View Details. You should then be able to see the blurb.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by nevermiffed

I just finished getting all my fanfic onto Calibre, and I am trying to get the summary onto the cover of the books. I have the generate cover plugin and while I can have the summary on the cover, it has a lot of HTML with it. How can I make it, well, not have that?

I was trying to make a custom column for summary/comments that would edit those out, but I have no clue what I'm doing here.

I was mostly using these posts as a guide

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=331027
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=4143924

If you don't want HTML in the summary text then set it up as a plain text column, as shown in this screen capture. If you change the "Interpret this column as" for an existing column you must remove the HTML from any existing value.

That said, I agree that when using a Kobo it is much better to put the blurb into its book details. This requires that the blurb be in the Comments column.

[BetterRed]

Maybe someone can devise a way to use a jacket page generated by Polish or Modify as a cover page… other than taking a screen shot of it and adding that to the epub.

BR

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Maybe someone can devise a way to use a jacket page generated by Polish or Modify as a cover page… other than taking a screen shot of it and adding that to the epub.

BR

If you turn off sending the cover, won't the first page to taken as the cover?

[BetterRed]

No idea Jon, I rip the covers off and use a non graphic file manager and no frills readers.

BR

[irrationalpie]

Originally Posted by nevermiffed

I just finished getting all my fanfic onto Calibre, and I am trying to get the summary onto the cover of the books. I have the generate cover plugin and while I can have the summary on the cover, it has a lot of HTML with it. How can I make it, well, not have that?

I was trying to make a custom column for summary/comments that would edit those out, but I have no clue what I'm doing here.

I was mostly using these posts as a guide

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=331027
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=4143924

I've done this exact thing! With some extra weirdness to try to have the summary truncate gracefully if it's too long by adding "(...)" after a period or comma or such. I added a "max" column (this holds a number that can override the default summary truncation length) and I added a "summary" column and defined a formula to generate it from the "comments" and "max" column. The formula is hideous because I couldn't use loops, I've got the text here you can copy (see gdocs link below). The way the max column works is that by default the summary gets truncated sometime before it gets to 201 characters--you can change this default near the beginning of the script if that doesn't work well for your covers! And for a particular cover, if it needs to be truncated sooner (say the summary has a bunch of dialogue so it's not very long but it's in a bunch of paragraphs) you can just mess with the max column, trying numbers higher or lower than 201 until that particular summary looks the way you want it! I'm not sure how coherent this explanation is, but I'll try to monitor this thread in case you decide to try this out and have follow-up questions

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...t?usp=drivesdk

[sushigal007]

So first off, I love this plugin. That said, I've had a look through the thread and I see there used to be a stroke option for fonts that got removed at some point, somebody asked about it last year and never got a response so imma ask again now if we could ever see that come back? Or a drop shadow or background box, just something to help things stand out on busier backgrounds.

Also what exactly do Background and Border in the fonts tab actually do? I've tried changing them to random colours but I'm not seeing any difference to my fonts.

And finally, is there any way that the fonts dropdown menu could show what the fonts look like? Right now I'm having to open the fonts setting in Control Panel to remind myself what they look like every time I want to make a new template and it's a bit of a pain.

I just have a lot of thoughts about fonts, apparently.

[theducks]

Border There are 2 places controlled on the dimensions tab

Background is the cover area

Foreground is the color of the character

[sushigal007]

Ahh, I did suspect that was the case! Might be an idea to move those two options to Settings and just leave Fill in the Fonts tab to cut down on confusion, if only because Border really does look like it's a stroke setting and I'm sad it's not.

[Hotrod_Linc]

Hello!

I am looking for a way to add custom covers to my news collections generated by the fetch news feature in Calibre. I have looked through this forum and am aware that I am not the first person to try to do such a things, however I haven't found a solution as of yet.

Having found this plugin it alters and creates a cover in the way I like, however I have not found a way to active this plugin without the use of user interface and user interactions.

What I would like to do is this:

1. A new epub is create by Calibre, the Actions Chains Plugin (for example) detects the change in the library

2. Actions Chains calls the Generate Covers Plugin to apply a cover onto the new epub via a pre defined style profile in Generate Covers

I unfortunately am very much a beginner when it comes to code, but I do believe there is a way to automate this process with the use of Python. Action Chains can use python code directly, so my hope was to find the code used to apply the cover with Generate Covers to add it to an action chain.

Any and all help is appreciated.

[kiwidude]

Release Notes
https://github.com/kiwidude68/calibr...e_cover-v2.3.5

Special thanks to @chaley on this one for finding the issue when also taking the time to respond to a user query. Full details can be found on the issue thread here:
https://github.com/kiwidude68/calibr...ins/issues/101

TLDR - a user wanted to include the comments field in their cover, but stripping out any html around it first. This can be done use a python template for the formatter, once a blocking issue in the plugin was corrected. If anyone else needs the same functionality, you can paste this into the custom text field:

python:
def evaluate(book, context):
	from qt.core import QTextEdit
	from calibre.gui2.comments_editor import fix_html

	e = QTextEdit()
	e.setHtml(book.comments)
	e.setHtml(fix_html(e.toHtml(), e.toPlainText()))
	return e.toPlainText()

[Clem2605]

Hello!

I've had a small problem with the last update:
In my Custom Text option, I had a very simple

{#words}
{#genre}

That, until I updated to the last version this morning, used to go to a new line in between the content of the two custom columns.
Now, this only adds a space in-between.

I've fixed this issue by adding a <br>, so I'm not complaining, I just wasn't sure if this is an bug or not?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Clem2605

Hello!

I've had a small problem with the last update:
In my Custom Text option, I had a very simple

{#words}
{#genre}

That, until I updated to the last version this morning, used to go to a new line in between the content of the two custom columns.
Now, this only adds a space in-between.

I've fixed this issue by adding a <br>, so I'm not complaining, I just wasn't sure if this is an bug or not?

It isn't a bug. Newlines aren't significant in basic templates. Your solution is a good one. Another would be to use an advanced template:

program:
	$#words & character('newline') & $#genre

[Clem2605]

Originally Posted by chaley

It isn't a bug. Newlines aren't significant in basic templates. Your solution is a good one. Another would be to use an advanced template:

program:
	$#words & character('newline') & $#genre

Thank you! I knew this was probably the case, but since it still means that the way it worked before was the bug I thought it might be useful to report it!