[RobertJSawyer]

Hi, Kovid.

If a book in the calibre library has a title such as this:

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

or, say:

What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

and you right click on the cover in the preview pane and select "Save cover to disk," choosing "Save" from the Windows dialog that appears results in this error: "The file name is not valid."

And, indeed, it is not -- because of the colon in the first example and the question mark in the second.

As a writer and editor, I use this feature a fair bit to harvest a bunch of covers at a time to show to artists and art directors so they can see similar results to what I'm hoping they'll achieve.

Is it possible to have calibre either TRUNCATE the proposed file name at the first illegal character (colon, double quote, question mark, or asterisk -- the last sometimes used in titles that employ curse words) or SUBSTITUTE a legal character or characters in place of the illegal ones (perhaps a space followed by two hyphens and then another space -- like this, producing a typewriter em-dash -- rather than the colon-space combination so often used to separate titles from subtitles)? Either solution would be fine.

Many thanks for your kind consideration!

Rob