[GUI Plugin] Generate Cover

[theducks]

Originally Posted by affa

There should be a little zip file somewhere full of people's favorite background images that work well as generic book covers.

I think DrNefario summed it up: 'Not freely distributable'

Unless the Image is GPL, it is best to leave this collecting up to the individual user.

[DrNefario]

I created the (hopefully) attached image as a test. I seem to have slightly misremembered the default size, too, but the plugin can clear that up. It uses transparency to blend with the background colour, so you can have many variations from the one image.

Feel free to use it as you like.

I'm planning to make several more variants with different patterns and different title text areas. I wasted quite a lot of time today trying to figure out why my transparency wasn't working, only to find that it had been working all along, but Paintshop Pro had decided not to show it. And things are also complicated by the fact that I have no art packages on this machine, with Calibre on it, and no Calibre on my work machine, with the art package. Still, more tomorrow, I hope.

[affa]

Originally Posted by theducks

I think DrNefario summed it up: 'Not freely distributable'

Unless the Image is GPL, it is best to leave this collecting up to the individual user.

true, but there is plenty of GPL clipart... but it's a chore to go through and find ones that look classy and not cartoonish. a cartoony pile of books is of no interest to me, but a beautiful deco, or celtic, or [fill in the blank] border might be.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by affa

true, but there is plenty of GPL clipart... but it's a chore to go through and find ones that look classy and not cartoonish. a cartoony pile of books is of no interest to me, but a beautiful deco, or celtic, or [fill in the blank] border might be.

Dover (the publisher) has lots of 'Royalty free' clip art books for sale cheap ( lots of Celtic frames in that lot) They also have CD's full of the art (but not quite as cheap)

And I agree, most of the free clipart is cartoon-ish

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by theducks

Unless the Image is GPL, it is best to leave this collecting up to the individual user.

I believe for artwork and the like, "Creative Commons" is usually the license used for freely distributable content. Unfortunately, a lot of them do look cartoonish.

@DrNefario
Would you be able to create something similar to this but with a much smaller left margin? Would be great if the leather grain size could be reduced, too.
http://openclipart.org/detail/95545/...book-by-rg1024

The generic covers iBooks makes are pretty decent, too.

Spoiler:

[DrNefario]

I'm no artist, I'm afraid, so it's quite unlikely, but I might give it a go when I have some time.

I like those ones from iBooks. I wonder if there's a way to borrow them.

I now have the pieces to make several more semi-transparent covers like the one above, but I probably won't manage to put them together until the weekend.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I believe for artwork and the like, "Creative Commons" is usually the license used for freely distributable content. ...

True, but "freely distributable" doesn't mean that they can be altered. Using them for a book cover would be altering the image. Only when the CC work doesn't restrict changes and alterations (the No Derivatives flag) should you use it as a component in a cover. Also, CC works often require that give the creator credit for the work (the Attribution flag in the CC license).

[affa]

most things can be altered for personal use, but i agree it wouldn't be able to be part of any collection. i grabbed a nice greyscale textbook style illustration of an animal i like, and use that. it looks good. anyway, sorry i sort of derailed this thread. though i suppose talking about the generic covers we get to use THANKS to this awesome plugin is sort of on topic.

[DrNefario]

I've put together a set of covers based on semi-transparent textures. I'm not brilliantly happy with them, but some of them seem to work quite nicely.

The file's about 3Mb (mostly due to one of the four textures compressing much less well than the others, but it's probably the nicest one, so I left it in), and it's available from my Dropbox here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39906743/covers.zip

They can be freely used, redistributed, changed, sold (good luck with that), whatever you want.

Here are a few examples of how they blend with the background colour:

[affa]

very nice!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I've put together a set of covers based on semi-transparent textures. I'm not brilliantly happy with them, but some of them seem to work quite nicely.

The file's about 3Mb (mostly due to one of the four textures compressing much less well than the others, but it's probably the nicest one, so I left it in), and it's available from my Dropbox here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39906743/covers.zip

They can be freely used, redistributed, changed, sold (good luck with that), whatever you want.

Here are a few examples of how they blend with the background colour:

Attachment 88227Attachment 88226Attachment 88225

The cover for Woman in White is a bit harsh. They other two, not bad.

[44reader]

@DrNefario

Thanks for those covers.

[Jade Aislin]

I have finally gotten around to playing with this plugin. I've been able to generate a cover that has all the metadata I want on it. However, I noticed that if I include a space for data from a custom column in the custom text section, it will show up on the cover even if the book does not have that data. Is there a way to have that information not show up on the cover if there is no metadata in the column?

For example, in the attached picture there are two fields that do not have data (Warning and Genre). Is there some code I can put at the beginning of those lines so that they will not show up with empty fields? I want it to be like the series check mark. If it is there, it will show up on the cover, if it is not there, the entire line will not show up.

I'm probably missing some easy step.

- Jade Aislin

[kiwidude]

Jade, I am sure there is an answer within the template language syntax, using some variant of: {#warning:ifempty(x,'')}. What the x is is to concatenate the word "Warning " and $ for the current value is I have no idea, I've never grokked the template syntax. Perhaps chaley or another template language guru will spot this and can help. As per not so far back in this thread you can add newline characters into the x part of your expression with \n.

[chaley]

The easiest way to handle this situation is to use a prefix in the template. The prefix is added only if the field is not empty. For example, warning would be

{#warnings:|Warning: |}

and genre would be

{#genre:|Genre: |}

for more explanation, see Advanced formatting in the user manual.

Of course, it could be done with the test function. For example, the following examples in template program mode and general program mode work. However, unless the computation is more complicated than strcat, it isn't worth the trouble.

{#warnings:'test($, strcat('Warning: ', $), '')'}

or

program:
	v = field('#warnings');
	test(v, strcat('Warning: ', v), '')