A default textual cover page

[programandala-net]

When :front-cover-image: is not used, no alternative textual cover page is added. Other converters do: Pandoc uses <EPUB/text/title_page.xhtml> and dbtoepub uses <OEPS/index.html>.

I've done some tests, also with the <data/samples/sample-book.adoc> included in the sources: when :front-cover-image: is used, <EPUB/cover.xhtml> is created, but when the attribute is removed the file is missing.

By the way, when an EPUB has no cover image, my e-book reader creates its icon from its contents, therefore it doesn't show a clean textual cover with title, author and even version, but whatever comes first in the book, e.g. "Table of Contents" or the title of the first chapter...

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've seen nothing about this in the documentation, beside the description of :front-cover-image:.

Thanks.

[slonopotamus]

In the past, asciidoctor-epub3 was adding default cover image if document didn't have its own but we stopped doing that in #284.

Your suggestion makes sense, we could generate text-only cover page similar to what asciidoctor-pdf does (for documents with :doctype: book).

However, this will only work for EPUB3 since Mobi only supports cover image, not a full-blown page.

[programandala-net]

In the past, asciidoctor-epub3 was adding default cover image if document didn't have its own but we stopped doing that in #284.

I didn't know. I started using Asciidoctor EPUB3 only when the spine structure was removed. Formerly it was impractical for me.

A mandatory cover image seems too much. The editor must have as much control as possible. But anyway a book needs a cover page. A simple textual one seems reasonable.

When I realised this problem, I had to add something like this at the start of the documents, as a temporary solution:

ifdef::backend-epub3[]
== {doctitle}
--
{author}, {revdate}
--
<<<
endif::[]

Your suggestion makes sense, we could generate text-only cover page similar to what asciidoctor-pdf does (for documents with :doctype: book).

However, this will only work for EPUB3 since Mobi only supports cover image, not a full-blown page.

Ok. Well, every format must exploit its own features. Anyway, I'm interested only in EPUB, though I occasionaly convert to AZW3 with Calibre's ebook-convert command.

[slonopotamus]

No worries, I'm going to work on adding textual cover page soon.