[GUI Plugin] Generate Cover

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by version365

But the older versions of Qt5 calibre also has that font style choosing options in calibre settings. Can that list of font styles not be 'imported' to the plugin's dropdown menu?

It would have to be another UI redesign and config refactor, to replace all the UI elements with a button to open the font dialog, then converting the properties of that font into serializable JSON properties for the config file. There are pros and cons with either approach. Relying on QFontDialog interferes with the live preview of the response, users would have to manually drag windows around to see the impact of their changes as they flip fonts and sizes. Constantly closing and reopening it as they tweak other settings like alignment or padding in between. Given that several people including yourself complained about a lack of screen real estate with it as is, this could be seen as a big backwards step from a usability perspective. All just to gain a small number of additional font variations which no-one other than yourself has expressed any interest in.

Is it technically possible? Yes. Is it the “right” choice to do? Questionable. There are reasons why most editing apps have historically “inlined” font settings into simplified dropdowns and buttons. The tradeoff is less font selection, but sometimes less is more.

Not saying I won’t do it but I’m not going to rush into it. Plus I have to find the time to make more changes, which as always is at a premium.

[JSWolf]

How about a check for what version of calibre (qt5 or qt6 and supporting fonts based on the QT version)?

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How about a check for what version of calibre (qt5 or qt6 and supporting fonts based on the QT version)?

That still wouldn’t support what is being asked for (plus it just makes the code harder to read/maintain).

What I implemented was a static dropdown selection of weight options of which technically 3 more can be added to with Qt6 (two lighter and one heavier at extremes of the list from memory). I restricted it to just those that were common to Qt5 and Qt6.

What that means is as a user you can choose combinations of font + weight that don’t actually exist as an explicit font variation installed on your system. If that is the case then Qt does an interpolated attempt for drawing purposes. Much of the time most people won’t notice a difference unless you go pixel peeping or certain fonts not reacting well to such scaling.

The font dialog is instead based on a database showing you only font style variations that exist on your system as the font designer intended. Which means in some cases less combinations/flexibility than what I have implemented for some fonts. If the font designer only created “regular” and “bold regular” then that means no ability to render it as “light” or “extra bold” or italic etc.

Some purists might argue that is what they want - only fonts rendered to the best the font designer could design, rather than approximated rendering. Other users prefer dialing in the fonts to look exactly like what appeals to them.

Can’t keep everyone happy all of the time as every plugin thread shows…