Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwidude
@Chris Jones - as you likely have suspected by now there is no way to automatically choose a cover profile based on some attribute of the book such as a tag or custom column. Nor are settings remembered outside of allowing you to save custom profiles. What I suggest you do is save different profiles for your different cover variations, and then use calibre searches to bring back the subset of books that match that desired profile to select them all and generate cover for.
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Thanks for your quick reply.
And as you likely suspect.. what I was getting at is that such a nicely thought out mini-application is bound to cause at least some users to invest a lot of time designing high-quality covers that they will be tempted to keep improving.
In other words, I was politely asking that you might want to consider such an enhancement..
Alas your reply leads me to think that from the developing angle, it would be far from trivial to implement such changes.. therefore "not going to happen"..?
I can live with it: as you recommend, what I do at this point is create a bunch of "profiles", using the full/exact author's name followed by a number so I have no problems finding one particular subset of "settings" and only have to go through it sequentially when I need to retrieve the settings of an existing cover.
Here are a couple more features that would come in handy and might be easier to implement:
1. It would be a lot more flexible if one could (also) enter or adjust the title and author(s) manually.
Using the contents of calibre's #author and #title is usually fine, but I ran into scenarios where I had to change them temporarily to generate a given cover.
An example to clarify: the title of the book is something like "Nice Novel with Longish Title — Volume I". So that it remains somewhat legible on the resulting cover, I specify a point size of, e.g. 24.. and this gives me the following layout:
---------------------------------------------
Nice Author
Nice Novel with Longish Title
— Volume I
---------------------------------------------
Of course, this won't do.. so, I have to exit Generate Cover, remove the em-dash (?) in calibre's #title, go back into GC, generate the cover, exit/save, and edit back the title to what it initially was.
There are a bunch of other cases where it would give the user significantly more control if there were extra (hidden?) data entry fields both for the author and the title, the first one being by default automatically filled out with the contents of the calibre author/title variables (quite sufficient in most cases) but giving the user the option to manually enter/edit/tweak title and author to meet his current requirements.
2. It would be nice to have some form of "gallery" feature so as to be able to quickly pull one's custom covers (as opposed to all the stuff downloaded from the web)... to be able to use them as a source of inspiration for new stuff... show off one's best efforts to friends and family... make it easier to upload them to one's web site.. share the stuff on social networks.. email it to Mom.. etc. Perhaps some custom column filled automatically by Generate Cover might make it possible to restrict calibre's display to "those books whose cover was generated by GC" might do the trick with (practically) no extra coding..?