Reintroduction of -title and -file in Version 2.0

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Yes, I think that Kindle-send 2.0 misses important features that makes it kind of incomplete, even in comparison to its predecessor Kindle-send 1.0.

Kindle-send 2.0 introduced actions (send, download, ...) but stripped away the old parameters -file and -title. Both parameters have been replaced by an autodetection mechanism, at least according to the documentation.

This autodetection is perfectly fine for new users or the occasional upload of a single webpage. But it is insufficient for a robust integration in scripted workflows and more advanced use cases.

For example, let's say we collected a large number of urls, sorted by topic in multiple files. Using Kindle-send 2.0, it is currently impossible ...

to specify the title of resulting epub. It depends on the first url's title. No way to say "My physics textbooks".
to specify the file name of resulting epub. The epub name is basically random, which is unscriptable.

This is still all possible using Kindle-send 1.0.

Describe the solution you'd like

I suggest to add these optional parameters:

--title Adding this parameter implictly adds a build-in html page as the first url. It acts as a cover page. A very simple draft is included below. Using templating, the String {{title}} gets displayed as a book cover headline. The {{author}} string is "Powered by kindle-send" by default. Because why not.
--author This overrides the {{author}} string.
--file Save the epub using the name specified here.

The strings {{title}} and {{author}} could also go into epub metadata. The cover page would ideally be linked in the epub's ToC as Cover.

The minimal cover page has advantages:

It presents documents generated by kindle-send in a clean and consistent way on the e-reader device's library.
User-definable metadata makes the document clearly identifiable on the Kindle device and in Calibre.
Looks nice.

The minimal cover page has some disadvantages:

More user input, more code. Strings need sanitizing and html escaping.
Might give somebody the idea to request a more fancy cover page, art work etc.

Describe alternatives you've considered

It is perfectly possible to reintroduce the formerly existing parameters without adding a cover page. However, at least for me, the additional cover page seems to fit nicely into the title-autodetection mechanism that was introduced in v2.0.

As a side note, it would probably make kindle-send even be able to send a epub that consists just of a cover page: kindle-send --title "cover only" send ... or maybe not.

Cover html draft :

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <style>
    body { font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; }
    h1, p { text-align: center; }
    h1 { padding: 200px 0 0; }
  </style>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="author" content="{{param.author}}">
  <title>{{param.title}}</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>{{param.title}}</h1>
  <p>{{param.author}}</p>
</body>
</html>

nikhil1raghav / kindle-send

Reintroduction of -title and -file in Version 2.0 #32