[GUI Plugin] n-pages-previews

[serrnovik]

First of all I would like to thank you the author of the calibre and all the people who are involved in app and plugin development.


Here is my plugin for calibre:

Short description:
Plugin let you generate previews for first N pages of the book that allows quickly preview them.

My use case is sorting books children books to quickly judge if it is worth to read it or not. without the need to open the book which is not instantaneous.


Description

Preview Panel:
- Two-column thumbnail grid displays the first N pages of the selected book.
- One-click on the toolbar icon shows or hides the docked preview panel;


Generate Preview:
- Either from menu or from floating toolbar you generate previews for one or multiple books.

Storage:
Preview images live beside the source PDF in a .previews/ folder, keyed by file path, mtime, page count, width, and quality.
Ghostscript-backed conversion creates JPEGs; if Ghostscript is missing, the generator falls back to placeholder images so the UI remains usable.
No Calibre database tables are altered; settings stay in plugins/n_pages_previews.json.
Configuration Options (Preferences → Plugins → Customize)


Installation:
In Calibre: Preferences → Plugins → Load plugin from file, pick n-pages-previews.zip, then restart Calibre and add the button to your toolbar or menu.
Getting Help

[kovidgoyal]

Note that you dont need to rely on ghostscipt, calibre already contains code to render PDF files (this is how the functionality to view the first 10 pages of a PDF to select the cover is implemented). See the page_images() function in metadata/pdf.py

[Comfy.n]

Cool plugin, thanks.
Preview panel is something I never thought possible in Calibre UI!
But I'm getting this either on 7.26 portable or calibre main current version:

✗ Error: Could not find Calibre's ebook-convert binary

[BeckyEbook]

I didn't know you could make a panel like that either!
It opens up a whole new range of possibilities, so I'll have to think about it.