Add no-cover option to PDF output, like DOCX output

[opello]

The DOCX output plugin has a --docx-no-cover argument to prevent inserting the cover (or an automatically generated cover in my use case) at the beginning of the document. I don't know the history of this option and when digging in to try to find the appropriate way to add it to the PDF output plugin, it didn't seem as clear as I'd hoped at least when looking at docx_output.py and pdf_output.py.

Ideally this would ultimately include a UI checkbox for feature parity with the DOCX output workflow.

Experienced this behavior in calibre Portable 6.21 on Windows 10.

[opello (opello)]

> If your bug report is a feature request, then it will only be implemented if one of the calibre developers has the time/motivation to implement it.

I'm happy to take guidance on how to add this and open a pull request as well.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Why do you want such an option?

[opello (opello)]

I was editing down a book to a single section of a chapter to print using the integrated editor. This created an EPUB that needed converting to a suitable format for printing. PDF was an obvious choice, but the cover image was inserted, and wasn't desirable for this use case. Upon seeing the option for DOCX, I assumed there may also be a similar option for PDF, but when there wasn't, I tried deleting the cover image and metadata from my edited down EPUB. This meant that a "screenshot" type cover got generated and inserted anyway. I also tried using the DOCX output but the generated document's style was quite a bit different than when viewing or converting to PDF, at least unacceptably different to my preference.

It was easy enough to use GhostScript to strip the first page. But, I thought I might not be the only person to come across this scenario and it seemed like it might nicely add feature parity to output plugins servicing similar use cases.

I'm also curious, why does the option exist for DOCX?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

It matches the corresponding option in the docx input plugin to not
autodetect the first large image as a cover.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Fixed in branch master. The fix will be in the next release. calibre is usually released every alternate Friday.

[opello (opello)]

Thank you!