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marst · 04-19-2014, 01:23 AM

I wanted to update an EPUB file by adding a cover (a file on the local machine) and by updating the EPUB's description. I made those changes in calibre's metadata editor. The book then appeared in calibre's library with the new cover. I saved the EPUB to disk.

But I found that while I now had an updated description, the newly saved file did not have a cover. Yet the was book displayed in the calibre library with the new cover.

Then I thought I should try conversion (not just 'save to disk'). That did insert the cover page -- and now I had a different book. The CSS files had been altered with many new selectors added, elements within the XHTML body text files had new styles assigned, a new style sheet had been created and attached to all files, and in some cases styles now had line-height settings that differed from what they'd been before. I estimated that it might take 2 hours to fix all of those changes, even with batch search/replace (there'd be so many changes that I would probably need to write a script for that task). For now I will have to find some other way to add this cover.

Unless: Is there a way to tell calibre, when it does a conversion: leave all CSS intact -- no changes?

04-19-2014, 01:23 AM	#1
marst Connoisseur Posts: 72 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: Left coast, USA Device: Kobo Forma; Android tablet w/Mantano Reader	Adding a cover: save vs. convert I wanted to update an EPUB file by adding a cover (a file on the local machine) and by updating the EPUB's description. I made those changes in calibre's metadata editor. The book then appeared in calibre's library with the new cover. I saved the EPUB to disk. But I found that while I now had an updated description, the newly saved file did not have a cover. Yet the was book displayed in the calibre library with the new cover. Then I thought I should try conversion (not just 'save to disk'). That did insert the cover page -- and now I had a different book. The CSS files had been altered with many new selectors added, elements within the XHTML body text files had new styles assigned, a new style sheet had been created and attached to all files, and in some cases styles now had line-height settings that differed from what they'd been before. I estimated that it might take 2 hours to fix all of those changes, even with batch search/replace (there'd be so many changes that I would probably need to write a script for that task). For now I will have to find some other way to add this cover. Unless: Is there a way to tell calibre, when it does a conversion: leave all CSS intact -- no changes?