Output of fetch news gets twice larger

[Steven630]

Haven't updated Calibre for a while. I found that the output file of news fetch got about twice larger than before after updating Calibre to the latest version? Has the image quality improved?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Steven630

Haven't updated Calibre for a while. I found that the output file of news fetch got about twice larger than before after updating Calibre to the latest version? Has the image quality improved?

calibre does not ever increase the quality of images, images in the output are always either the same size or smaller than the originals downloaded from the site.

[Steven630]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

calibre does not ever increase the quality of images, images in the output are always either the same size or smaller than the originals downloaded from the site.

Then why did the output file increase in size? (I've tried several recipes and it happened to all of them.)

[kovidgoyal]

How should I know? They haven't increased for me. You probably changed the output profile, which meant that images were no longer scaled down.

[kovidgoyal]

The one change I can recall is that the news download system now preserves the original image instead of converting everything to jpeg, so if the website uses images in some other format, the image size could be larger in the final output.

[Steven630]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

The one change I can recall is that the news download system now preserves the original image instead of converting everything to jpeg, so if the website uses images in some other format, the image size could be larger in the final output.

Thank you. I think this is the reason. How can I change that?

[kovidgoyal]

If you wish to downsize images, use the compress_news_images setting in your recipes.

    #: Set this to False to ignore all scaling and compression parameters and
    #: pass images through unmodified. If True and the other compression
    #: parameters are left at their default values, jpeg images will be scaled to fit
    #: in the screen dimensions set by the output profile and compressed to size at
    #: most (w * h)/16 where w x h are the scaled image dimensions.
    compress_news_images = False

    #: The factor used when auto compressing jpeg images. If set to None,
    #: auto compression is disabled. Otherwise, the images will be reduced in size to
    #: (w * h)/compress_news_images_auto_size bytes if possible by reducing
    #: the quality level, where w x h are the image dimensions in pixels.
    #: The minimum jpeg quality will be 5/100 so it is possible this constraint
    #: will not be met.  This parameter can be overridden by the parameter
    #: compress_news_images_max_size which provides a fixed maximum size for images.
    #: Note that if you enable scale_news_images_to_device then the image will
    #: first be scaled and then its quality lowered until its size is less than
    #: (w * h)/factor where w and h are now the *scaled* image dimensions. In
    #: other words, this compression happens after scaling.
    compress_news_images_auto_size = 16

    #: Set jpeg quality so images do not exceed the size given (in KBytes).
    #: If set, this parameter overrides auto compression via compress_news_images_auto_size.
    #: The minimum jpeg quality will be 5/100 so it is possible this constraint
    #: will not be met.
    compress_news_images_max_size = None

    #: Rescale images to fit in the device screen dimensions set by the output profile.
    #: Ignored if no output profile is set.
    scale_news_images_to_device = True

    #: Maximum dimensions (w,h) to scale images to. If scale_news_images_to_device is True
    #: this is set to the device screen dimensions set by the output profile unless
    #: there is no profile set, in which case it is left at whatever value it has been
    #: assigned (default None).
    scale_news_images = None