[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[jherazob]

Hi! Was forwarded here as i'm mostly interested in the plugin version of the tool (might try the CLI version at some point but for now the plugin fulfills my needs).

Has anybody cracked how to properly use covers with anthologies? Seems like the documented instructions assume you're using the CLI tool and not the plugin. I have defined the cover on the ebook metadata and still doesn't generate it on the EPUB file, but i suspect that since anthologies are a special case they're just not accounted for. In addition, i'm taking the stories from DeviantArt (which is the whole reason i'm using anthologies in the first place, DA has no concept of index or chapters), so all the stories lack covers and therefore i cannot tell it to look for the cover in them.

What should i do to do this? Is there a way to tell it "The chapters are these, and the cover is here" or something like that?

[julo]

@ jherazob
Have you looked ay the 'Generate Cover' plug-in?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=124219
While I have it installed I never used it so cannot say any more.

[jherazob]

Yes, it makes no difference whether i add the cover via editing the metadata or generated using the plugin (which is nicer, honestly), same result, an EPUB file with no cover. Calibre insists that the book has a cover, but it's absent from the file, logic would say that editing the epub metadata would keep the cover but doesn't look like it does. Was pointed at this FAQ entry about it which plainly states that the cover of the first story will be used by default as the cover for the anthology, but as mentioned DeviantArt stories have no covers, so logic would suggest that it should look at the metadata entry for the book and use that, but doesn't seem to do it.

Originally Posted by julo

@ jherazob
Have you looked ay the 'Generate Cover' plug-in?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=124219
While I have it installed I never used it so cannot say any more.

[theducks]

There is only 1 'Official' cover in any book.
All the rest are just a page with an image.
So... Collect the images of the covers from your Fav site(s)
Insert a blank page where you want , Use the Editor (on that page): Click the Insert Image icon (on the page toolbar). Add CSS styling to taste.

Repeat for each image

Alternately, you could walk the (canceled) covers to their new home

Add a cover (tools:add cover), then remove the 'cover' semantics for both the XHTML and image /It looks like you need to edit the OPF/
The advantage is Add Cover does all the SVG code

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by jherazob

Yes, it makes no difference whether i add the cover via editing the metadata or generated using the plugin (which is nicer, honestly), same result, an EPUB file with no cover. Calibre insists that the book has a cover, but it's absent from the file, logic would say that editing the epub metadata would keep the cover but doesn't look like it does.
...

Calibre displays and updates the cover in the library.

If you want the cover you made in Calibre to be in the epub on disk, you also have use Calibre's built-in Polish book feature or the Modify Epub plugin to update/inject the cover into the existing epub.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that when you send a book from Calibre to a device, one of the metadata that Calibre automatically injects is the cover. So many users may never realize that their epubs on disk don't have covers in them.

[jherazob]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

If you want the cover you made in Calibre to be in the epub on disk, you also have use Calibre's built-in Polish book feature or the Modify Epub plugin to update/inject the cover into the existing epub.

The Modify Epub plugin did the trick! Thanks!

[DandalfTheWhite]

This seems to be a new policy on ao3. Do you recommend changing any settings? I think I recall already slowing down ao3 down on my system, but how slow should we go? I haven’t updated or downloaded anything in a while. https://www.transformativeworks.org/...n-the-archive/

Thanks!

[ownedbycats]

It's measures against large-scale data-scraping. I would not worry too much unless you're trying to pull down the entire archive (in which case, don't do that).

Do email notifications instead of updating your entire library, though.

[DandalfTheWhite]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

It's measures against large-scale data-scraping. I would not worry too much unless you're trying to pull down the entire archive (in which case, don't do that).

Do email notifications instead of updating your entire library, though.

Yeah that’s what I figured but I didn't want them to like ban my ip. I do the email notifications updating already and I was hoping it was just large scale stuff but wanted to make sure. Thanks!

[ownedbycats]

Also note this:

However, we don’t have a policy against responsible data collection — such as those done by academic researchers, fans backing up works to Wayback Machine or Google’s search indexing. Putting systems in place that attempt to block all scraping would be difficult or impossible without also blocking legitimate uses of the site.

AO3 allows downloads of fics for backup/viewing on different places. Using FanFicFare to do pretty much the same thing likely falls under the same scope.

[JimmXinu]

AO3 has, for some time now, had a blocking mechanism when a user (or IP? we don't know how it's implemented) makes too many requests.

What counts as 'too many' is unknown. I would speculate it's somewhere between dozens and hundreds of downloads/update attempts in a short period of time--which is another parameter we don't know.

Only a few users bumped into this problem at the time, but a default setting of slow_down_sleep_time:2 was added under [archiveofourown.org], which was enough for almost all users.

Unless we start seeing it happen, we won't know what may be changed.

As for settings, if you are particularly paranoid about it, you could set slow_down_sleep_time to a higher value.

[ownedbycats]

When I was populating the long-text metadata column a year or two back, I found updating more than 50 stories at once with the default sleep-time would usually trigger a temporary block.

[ownedbycats]

Dumb question: Would it be possible to download this as a 'fic'? The link isn't accepted by the downloader.
https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/10851

I'd like to have a copy in my library for quick reference.

[JimmXinu]

Not story is not a story.

[sios00]

In case anyone is interested, I made a Google Apps Script that will copy all AO3 story links in your Gmail inbox and then print it out so that you can just copy all of that and immediately add it to FanficFare.

How I use this:
- For me, all AO3 story updates or new stories from followed authors are immediately set to be in the Updates category by Gmail.
- I have Gmail set to automatically match all emails from @archiveofourown.org and apply the label "Fanfic" to those emails.
- Whenever I have a few emails of new story updates or new stories from authors I follow, I leave them in the inbox under the Updates category *and* the Fanfic label.
- I then run this script from script.google.com and then copy the contents of the last Log printout, then paste it in Fanficfare's "Download from URLs" tab.
- All the story links will then be immediately downloaded by Fanficfare.
- I then archive all of those emails so they are no longer in my inbox and won't be gathered again the next time I run the script.

Why I do this:
- Previously I had to manually look at each email and then right click on the story name, click on "Copy Link" and then paste it into Fanficfare. It was troublesome to do so especially if there are multiple fics that have been updated since the last time I saved all of them.
- Now I can just ensure that all the AO3 emails that are in my inbox and are labelled with "Fanfic" are the stories that I want to download, then run the script to copy all the emails' story links into one easy place to copy into Fanficfare, instead of copying the links one by one, email by email.

How to set this up:
1. Go to https://script.google.com/ and create a new project.
2. Replace whatever code is in there by default with the following. Change the label or category as needed.

function collectLinks() {
  // Get the label to search
  var label = "Fanfic";

  // Get the category to search
  var category = "Updates";

  // Get the regex expression for the email subject
  var subjectRegex = /[AO3]/;

  // Get the regex expression for the link
  var linkRegex0 = /http:\/\/archiveofourown.org\/works\/(\d+)/;
  var linkRegex = new RegExp(linkRegex0, "g");

  var links = new Set(); // So that only unique links will be stored (n)

  // Get all messages in the label and category that are in the inbox (ie. not deleted or archived)
  var threads = GmailApp.search('label:' + label + ' category:' + category + " in:inbox");

  // Iterate over the threads
  for (var i = 0; i < threads.length; i++) {
    // Get all messages in the thread
    var messages = threads[i].getMessages();

    // Iterate over the messages
    for (var j = 0; j < messages.length; j++) {
      // Get the subject of the message
      var subject = messages[j].getSubject();

      Logger.log("Subject: "+ subject);

      // If the subject matches the regex expression
      if (subjectRegex.test(subject)) {
        var body = messages[j].getBody();

        // Get the link from the message
        var extractedLinks = body.match(linkRegex);
        // var extractedLinks = body.matchAll(linkRegex);

        // Print the link
        Logger.log("Extracted link: "+ extractedLinks);

        // Add the extracted links into the set of links
        for (var link of extractedLinks) {
          links.add(link);
        }

      }
    }
  }
  
  // Log out all collected links
  var uniqueLinks = Array.from(links);
  Logger.log(uniqueLinks);

}

3. Click on Run
4. Copy the contents of the last Log Info line, excluding the open and close square brackets.
5. Go to Fanficfare in Calibre and click on the down arrow, then click on "Download from URLs".
6. The contents of whatever was copied should be automatically pasted inside.
7. Change the download options if needed, then click on OK.

If there are any better ways to do this, I'm also open to hearing about it!