Cover generation seems broken

[Soreine]

Even with the default configuration, it's impossible to get an acceptable result.

{
    "title": "Book Title",
    "author": "Author Name",
    "plugins": ["autocover"],
    "pluginsConfig": {
        "autocover": {
            "font": {
                "family": "Impact",
                "color": "#000"
            },
            "size": {
                "w": 1800,
                "h": 2360
            },
            "background": {
                "color": "#FFF"
            }
        }
    }
}

Result:

[Soreine]

We probably won't fix this, because managing the dependencies of this plugin is a pain, and covers are losing importance. People who need a cover will just have to make one using simple tools such as Photoshop or Inkscape, and it might as well be simpler.

People who would like to maintain this plugin are welcome to do so.

[piranna]

It's loosing importance because it got unmaintained. I was having some ideas as moving all the rendering code to the SVG engine to make it simpler and more flexible and only require to define some metadata inside book.json, but I've not done it yet because it lasted so much time to accept and publish my other pull-requests on npm. I don't need it anymore, but if I get sure it will be reviewed in a razonable time, I'll more than happy to do TheCorrectThing(tm) and implement it. El 14/6/2016 12:06, "Nicolas Gaborit" notifications@github.com escribió:

We probably won't fix this, because managing the dependencies of this plugin is a pain, and covers are losing importance. People who need a cover will just have to make one using simple tools such as Photoshop or Inkscape, and it might as well be simpler.

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[Soreine]

@piranna, your past contributions were really appreciated. I can simply add you as collaborator on the repo, so you can freely merge contributions if needed (and also as NPM package publisher). Of course, we would keep a Pull Request based workflow, to allow reviews and discussions. What do you think ?

[AaronO]

@piranna The autocover plugin is no longer enabled by default and we stopped rendering covers a long time ago.

However I did start coding something you might be interested in: https://github.com/AaronO/magic-covers. It's basically a library to generate covers based on generative art, it could be turned into a small single page JS app (with React) so people can enter their title other info and get a decent looking cover.

Here are a few samples based on the oreally cover style: https://github.com/AaronO/magic-covers

[piranna]

@piranna, your past contributions were really appreciated

Thank you :-)

I can simply add you as collaborator on the repo, so you can freely merge contributions if needed (and also as NPM package publisher). Of course, we would keep a Pull Request based workflow, to allow reviews and discussions. What do you think ?

Ok, I agree on that. My concerns was mostly because it seemed the repo got unmaintained in benefict of core gitbook one, and it was a bit sad...

@piranna The autocover plugin is no longer enabled by default and we stopped rendering covers a long time ago.

I know it's not enabled by default now, I think it's the correct thing here.

However I did start coding something you might be interested in: https://github.com/AaronO/magic-covers. It's basically a library to generate covers based on generative art, it could be turned into a small single page JS app (with React) so people can enter their title other info and get a decent looking cover.

Here are a few samples based on the oreally cover style: https://github.com/AaronO/magic-covers

They looks nice! :-D Although I don't know if it makes to have it only as a webapp, I'm more into automatically build everything from sources instead of adding some "blobs" to my code or books, and in this context a pregenerated image is blob if you could be able to generate the same image providing the raw source data instead...

I remember another code that was generating the cover backgrounds randomly using a system similar to GitHub identicons, but I've never seen it again, do you know what would have happened to it?

Oh, and by the way: please generate SVG files instead of PNG when possible, they are better for printing ;-)