[GUI Plugin] Modify ePub

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

Not sure if this is the right place but... Was just trying to add a cover to an epub. The current epub has the title page as the first page and I wanted to keep it. I can't seem to find a setting in Modify ePub to "add cover". There is "Insert or replace cover" which replaces the title page "cover" and that's it.

So to sum things up... kinda asking for a new feature of "add cover" whenever you do an update.

I'm not quite sure what you're after here, due in part to the slippery way "title page" gets used in Calibre.

Traditionally, there is a cover - a single full-page image for the outside of a book - which is carried in a document that Calibre calls the title page, and which is the beginning (first page) of the ebook. There is also a title page - the book's title and author's name, usually as black text on white, sometimes as a logo - that appears as one of the first pages inside the book.

Thus, your post leaves me confused about what you want to do - because it sounds like you simultaneously want to keep the cover as-is and add a new cover. Can you clarify?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

Not sure if this is the right place but... Was just trying to add a cover to an epub. The current epub has the title page as the first page and I wanted to keep it. I can't seem to find a setting in Modify ePub to "add cover". There is "Insert or replace cover" which replaces the title page "cover" and that's it.

So to sum things up... kinda asking for a new feature of "add cover" whenever you do an update.

What you call a title page IS the cover. It's a generic cover so the publisher doesn't have to pay to use the cover image. So what you are doing is replacing this generic cover with the cover you've chosen. Most ePub that do not have a proper cover have a generic cover of some kind and a title page. So if you just add a cover and keep the generic cover, then you get the cover, the generic cover, and the title page (im most cases).

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

I'm not quite sure what you're after here, due in part to the slippery way "title page" gets used in Calibre.

Traditionally, there is a cover - a single full-page image for the outside of a book - which is carried in a document that Calibre calls the title page, and which is the beginning (first page) of the ebook. There is also a title page - the book's title and author's name, usually as black text on white, sometimes as a logo - that appears as one of the first pages inside the book.

Thus, your post leaves me confused about what you want to do - because it sounds like you simultaneously want to keep the cover as-is and add a new cover. Can you clarify?

That is exactly what I want to do. The "cover" of this book is a titlepage (black and white with title, author and the publishers logo etc). This titlepage is not displayed again. So, I want to ADD a cover.

But then again, just being able to add a new cover and retain the old one also makes sense sometimes. There are some books that I would not mind having two different covers (it would make the uk and us title being different easier to deal with. Just add a second cover and you have all the info right there with no need for wordy tags etc. that may never be read).

I would really like to be able to select an option to add a cover without replacing anything.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What you call a title page IS the cover. It's a generic cover so the publisher doesn't have to pay to use the cover image. So what you are doing is replacing this generic cover with the cover you've chosen. Most ePub that do not have a proper cover have a generic cover of some kind and a title page. So if you just add a cover and keep the generic cover, then you get the cover, the generic cover, and the title page (im most cases).

True sometimes, however not all the time. I have several that I would like to just ADD a cover. It is a personal preference but then again most of what we do when we add tags and edit the comments is also personal preference.

I figure I'm not the only one who would like to be able to choose to add a cover(and not replace) occasionally. I am not saying that the majority of the time I prefer to "replace" but maybe between 10 and 5 percent of the time I want to add only.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by LadyKate

That is exactly what I want to do. The "cover" of this book is a titlepage (black and white with title, author and the publishers logo etc). This titlepage is not displayed again. So, I want to ADD a cover.

With all due respect... not so much. What you want to do is "demote" the existing cover to become the first internal page, then add a new cover at the beginning. (It may not sound like much of a difference, but it is. It's all about the structure; the "cover page" is a special thing and gets treated differently from other documents.)

Originally Posted by LadyKate

I would really like to be able to select an option to add a cover without replacing anything.

Unfortunately, while that's not exactly the most arduous of tasks, there are too many variables involved for it to really fit into Modify's scope and architecture.

Now, if I were doing this by hand, here's how I'd go about it. In this example, suppose I have the "real" cover as a prepped JPG image...

1. Open the EPUB in the Calibre editor.
2. Open the cover page, probably named titlepage.xhtml.
3. Click somewhere in the HTML code and hit Control-A Control-C to select everything and copy it to the clipboard.
4. At the bottom of the HTML preview panel on the right, look for the "split" icon and click that button. Hovering over the preview should result in a colored line showing up above the pointer.
5. Click somewhere in that preview - doesn't matter where - to split the existing page. You should now have two open HTML pages, and you're looking at the code for one of them - the new one, I think.
6. Hit Control-A Control-V to replace the "split" code with the original code, then close the tab. You should now be back in the original document's tab.
7. Hit Control-A Control-V again. You now have two identical "cover pages" - but only one's the real cover, and it should be the one that's open, the first one in the list. (You can identify it by the little "book" icon next to the filename.) If that's not true, right-click the first page in the file list (which should be bold and italic, as it's the active tab) and make it the cover page.
8. Rename the new, not-cover page to something like tp.xhtml and the not-cover image to something similar. Doesn't really matter what you call 'em, as long as the names don't match anything else in the book, but "tp" for "title page" makes sense and is short.
9. Import the new cover image into the book and rename it if you need to. Right-click it and mark it as the cover image.
10. Look back up at the code in the open tab. See where it's got the title image's name? Change that to the newly-added image's name. If all goes well, you should see the preview pane change to show the new cover image. (If you see an empty box instead, there may be a folder problem to sort out. If there was a folder or path before the not-cover image's filename, rename the real-cover image to start with that same path. Alternately, erase the real-cover filename from the code and start typing it. Calibre should auto-complete it and handle the path stuff on its own.)
11. Save the book and try it out in your favorite reader!

There may be a plugin that'll take care of that for you, but if nothing else, now you know why this isn't as simple as you might've thought.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

With all due respect... not so much. What you want to do is "demote" the existing cover to become the first internal page, then add a new cover at the beginning. (It may not sound like much of a difference, but it is. It's all about the structure; the "cover page" is a special thing and gets treated differently from other documents.)

Unfortunately, while that's not exactly the most arduous of tasks, there are too many variables involved for it to really fit into Modify's scope and architecture.
...

I guess I still would like to see a plugin that would allow for adding a new cover and demoting any other cover. Frequently I will have ebooks with rather plain covers and would like to add a new one maintaining the original. I can do it manually but if you don't ask, you don't get.

It is only by putting out a desire for a plugin or plugin mod that we see if others have a similar desire and if there is a demand for that kind of functionality.

And I see what you mean about it being outside of modify epub's scope. It would change the structure of the epub itself.

[BetterRed]

@LadyKate - FWIW:- firstly, I have no interest in having multiple covers within an ePub, in fact I use the Modify plugin to remove any 'covers' etc

However I am interested in keeping a copy of any extra covers within the library. I achieve that by putting the all the covers (in their original size, resolution etc) into a multipage TIFF file with IrfanView, I have Preference->Tweaks->Image file types to treat as ebooks when dropping onto the Book Details panel set to 'TIFF, TIF'. If a book has a TIFF file I indicate its presence with a 'camera' icon.

If I happen to find another cover for a book I can add it to the TIFF, again with IrfanView.

BR

[nhedgehog]

I got some ebooks where every line is ended with a

<br/>

like this:

bla bla blub bla bla<br/>
bla bla blub bla bla, bla bla blub bla bla<br/>
bla bla blub bla bla.<br/>
<br/>
bla bla blub bla bla.<br/>

resulting in a very ugly page layout.
Till now I was using "Edit book", doing a search and replace in 3 steps to fix the problem:
1) search and replace (regex) for:

^<br/>

replace with

@@@@@@

2) search and replace (regex) for:

<br/>

replace with " "(Space)
3) 1) search and replace (regex) for:

@@@@@@

replace with

<br/><br/>

I wonder if there is a way to do this with modify epub or if this feature could be incorporated.

[Rev. Bob]

There's not currently a way to do that with Modify, no. Including such a feature could be hazardous, as that kind of layout can be used deliberately - for instance, to display poetry or addresses - and doing such a blanket replacement would ruin those cases.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by nhedgehog

I got some ebooks where every line is ended with a

<br />

like this:

bla bla blub bla bla<br />
bla bla blub bla bla, bla bla blub bla bla<br />
bla bla blub bla bla.<br />
<br />
bla bla blub bla bla.<br />

Where did these eBooks come from? I've never seen any retail eBooks with that sort of coding. Doesn't mean they aren't out there. Just never seen and I'm interested where they came from.

[nhedgehog]

@JSWolf: Books are coming from a firefox plugin I use to download webpages as ebooks. Often these were text files which ended like this.

@Rev. Bob: Thanks for the clarification. I had a look at the code and changed the plugin myself, so that unpretty is now doing exactly what I was looking for me.

[JSWolf]

It's very easy to replace the <br /> with something else using the Calibre eBook editor.

[nhedgehog]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's very easy to replace the <br /> with something else using the Calibre eBook editor.

Thats right ... but now its even easier for me.

[botmtl]

I have noticed that "data-uris" are detected as broken links and removed by this plug-in.

Would it be possible to fix this behavior?

(see attachment for an example where images are being removed)

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by botmtl

I have noticed that "data-uris" are detected as broken links and removed by this plug-in.

Would it be possible to fix this behavior?

Who on Earth is building ebooks that way, instead of using image files like a sane person? There are times when text-encoded images make sense on the web, but in a static ebook file? That's just plain inefficient.