Thread: Book covers not loading properly on Kobo Forma
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Old 12-10-2018, 10:09 PM   #10
davidfor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by FavSport:Reading View Post
Ok. I now understand how to use prettify. The instructions in there say to then use Polish Books. I went to plugins to get it but it doesn't give me the option to install it. I don't know how to make it work. It doesn't show up with the icons. No idea how to use it. Any ideas? Sorry to be such a pain.
[Started writing this earlier but got interrupted by work, so there is some duplication of what @jackie_w said.]

Polish books is part of calibre. Unless you have a very old calibre installation, it will be on the toolbar. The icon is a brush. If it isn't there, you can add it in the preferences on the "Toolbars & Menus" page.

But, you don't need to use Prettify. That is a way of fiddling with the cover in the calibre library. If you have a cover there already, it will usually be reasonable starting point. If you used metadata download to get a cover it will probably be all you need. Prettify is mainly for tweaking the cover image in some way.

My process is roughly:
  • Add the book to calibre.
  • Download the metadata including the cover. I choose the cover I like the best and is a decent size.
  • Update the cover in the book. This can be by using Polish books, the Modify ePub plugin, a conversion (only if other things need to happen) or just opening the editor (depends on the book).
  • Check everything looks good in the viewer.
  • Send to the device and look at it there.
  • Tweak things in the editor as needed.

Once the you have done the third step, if you change the cover later, calibre can automatically update the cover when you send the book to the device. Even if you haven't done this, calibre will try to update it, but might not be able to, or the results might not be as good.

And as has been said, my Kobo Utilities plugin has a function to replace the covers on the device if you change them or don't like how they look,
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