No Cover image on Mac epub icon or in Apple Books.

[shoesforindustry]

I just compiled a book and it has no book cover image on the icon or when added to Apple Books.
Mac 15.2 (24C101) - Pandoc pandoc 3.6.1 - iMac M3.

So I then proceeded to compile a book I had compiled under a previous version of Pandoc. This too had no cover image icon on Mac finder or in apple books.

Some images might make it clearer:
In Finder:

In Apple Books:

Same book, same compile system but different results?

The last time the original books was compiled was August 6th 2024, so I guess it would have been pandoc 3.3 2024-07-28 via homebrew.

I had a look at the Release notes for later versions of pandoc and checked if anything had changed to the epub image and could only find:
"pandoc 3.6 (2024-12-07)
EPUB writer: Use standardized filename for cover image instead of the original name (#10404). This avoids problems with e.g. filenames containing spaces."

Anyone any ideas?

[jgm]

How did you tell pandoc to use a cover image? Did you use --epub-cover-image on the command line or include cover-image: in YAML metadata? Is the cover image present at the path you specified?

[jgm]

PS. Cover images still work in my tests.

[shoesforindustry]

Hi John, thanks for the prompt reply and apologies for my tardiness, a winter virus intervened... anyway after a bit of research I have found the following example to illustrate the issue.

book.md

---
title: Book Title
cover-image: cover-image.jpg
---

# Heading 1

Some text

Compile with:

pandoc book.md --to epub2 -o book.epub

And you get no icon for the epub in Mac Finder or the book cover in Apple Books.

Looking at the files I see in the content.opf (after the change to using file0 for the cover image) the issue:

<meta name="cover" content="cover-image_jpg" /> 

Which I think should reference file0, and indeed changing it to...

 <meta name="cover" content="file0_jpg" /> 

...means you can see the icon for the epub in Mac Finder and the book cover in Apple Books.

I'm not sure if this is just for epub2? But I hope this helps in identifying the issue.

Russ

[jgm]

I can confirm this. I had tested before with epub3; this problem only appears with epub2.