[GUI Plugin] Generate Cover

[kiwidude]

Users will often have books in their collection for which there is no official cover available to download, such as short fiction and articles. Calibre includes the ability to generate a cover for you from the book metadata. However currently the only control over its appearance it offers is a tweak for the font.

This plugin offers an enhanced alternative that allows you to select from your own choice of cover images and a wide range of layout/appearance options.

Main Features:

• Add/remove your own images to a list to choose from when you generate
• Option to use the existing book cover as an embedded image
• Control which metadata to display and where it is located on the cover
• Option to swap author name for users who store it in Calibre as LN, FN
• Fine tune many aspects of cover appearance such as fonts, borders, colors and margins
• Save your customised settings under a name to quickly recall multiple different appearances
• Export your settings for sharing and import settings from other users
• Option to use an image as a background rather than a content item
• Option to add custom text to a cover, using Calibre's template language to place your choice of additional data on the cover
• Option to auto-size text to fit on a single line for long text

Special Notes:

• Help Documentation
• Change History
• Requires Calibre v2.3.0 or later.

Sample Cover Settings:

• Firefly and Roswell by Vaesse
• Buffy and Angel by Vaesse
• More TV series covers here, here and here by Vaesse
• Harry Potter by MiniMouse
• More covers can be found on this thread
• [Custom Covers] Blanks, Templates - get them, share them, help to modify and create

Paypal Donations:

• If you find this or any of my other plugins useful please feel free to show your appreciation. I have spent many hundreds of unpaid hours in their development and support so any encouragement for me to continue is appreciated!
  

[msr]

Simply great. You're becoming the plugin king!

[DoctorOhh]

Thanks for this plugin.

The only thing I noticed was not being able to see all 3 numbers in the cover width and height dimensions (see attached).

This might be due to using increased font sizes but this is the only area of calibre that limits me in this way.

[kiwidude]

Oops, thats a pretty ugly screen layout dwanthy! I've pushed up a new version now. I had been through a lot of variations of layout as this was developed and I thought of new customisations, and I'd left some rather crude sizing code in there. The new version should hopefully address your issues.

Let me know how you get on - now I've figured out what to do I'll make sure I don't make the same mistake in my other plugins again.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Let me know how you get on - now I've figured out what to do I'll make sure I don't make the same mistake in my other plugins again.

Looks great!

[GRiker]

Attempting to customize the plugin yields the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/griker/Documents/calibredev/calibre/src/calibre/gui2/preferences/plugins.py", line 260, in customize_plugin
    self.modify_plugin(op='customize')
  File "/Users/griker/Documents/calibredev/calibre/src/calibre/gui2/preferences/plugins.py", line 319, in modify_plugin
    if not plugin.is_customizable():
  File "/Users/griker/Documents/calibredev/calibre/src/calibre/customize/__init__.py", line 248, in is_customizable
    self.customization_help()
  File "<string>", line 59, in customization_help
AttributeError: 'GenerateCoverBase' object has no attribute 'customization_help'

But other than that, this is a very nice plugin.

G

[kiwidude]

I've done so many plugins now that have customisation via Preferences I clearly screwed up the situation for a plugin that doesn't and didn't rip out enough code

New version attached to the first post.

[Perkin]

Thanks kiwidude.

[Perkin]

A couple of tweaks...
Can you do it so you can select the Font colour
And allow the image to be the whole background, I've got some nice leather look covers and would like the whole cover to be that, not just an inset image.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Perkin

A couple of tweaks...
Can you do it so you can select the Font colour
And allow the image to be the whole background, I've got some nice leather look covers and would like the whole cover to be that, not just an inset image.

Both were on my list to investigate for a future version but I figured I would wait to see if anyone asked for them. Then you ask in the first 24 hours... lol

There is a bit of a dependency between them, since unless you have a light background you are going to want the text color changed. However I haven't figured out how to change the color since I can't find any code in Calibre related to this in the Magick libraries. I suspect it is something to do with a DrawingWand but it is yet another library I have no knowledge of. I'll ask in the developer forum here if Kovid doesn't spot this post and reply here.

[kovidgoyal]

Changing text color would require additional APIs from ImageMagick to be wrapped in python, IIRC it can't be done with the currently available API.

[kiwidude]

Thanks Kovid, I suspected as much but nice to get confirmation

[Iocane]

First, I want to say brilliant plugin. This and Search the Internet have both become features I can't live without!

I do have one question -- Is it possible to store multiple settings?

For example, I've mostly been generating covers in two cases:

1) Books with ... unfortunate covers. Either very small, poor quality, or just dull, and I'd like to have something a bit nicer.

2) Short stories from anthologies. When I have anthologies, I like to have each story as its own entry, as well as the full anthology itself.

Ideally, I'd like to use different settings for each kind of cover. Like using Times Roman font, and a blue background for the book covers, and using Tahoma with a green background for the short stories, and being able to switch easily between the two.

I know very little about coding so I'm not sure how tricky this would be, though.

Keep up the great work!

[kiwidude]

Thanks for the feedback and glad it has become useful to you.

Funnily enough something like what you suggest did occur to me when I wrote it. However I chose not to put it into 1.0 to see if anyone felt a need for it first, a bit like the suggestions from Perkin above.

My interim approach was to allow the user to overwrite the default settings, so that gave you one set stored, plus a second temporarily being used.

However I think the addition of the ability to save the settings as a named set would be the more flexible approach. So if you like a particular font/image for your science fiction books versus another combination for romance etc you could configure that up and then just choose from a list on the left side of the dialog.

I'll add it to the list for v1.1. Kovid has kindly made some additions to the API with 0.7.49 to allow me to set font color so I will be adding Perkin's suggestions as well.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I'll add it to the list for v1.1. Kovid has kindly made some additions to the API with 0.7.49 to allow me to set font color so I will be adding Perkin's suggestions as well.

Font color, just in time.

Is there the possibility of using a books existing cover as the image, resizing it and using it as the image for a modified book cover?