Hi,
I am learning to use bookdown. So far I was able to compile my Rmd documents in sequence and the gitbook is compiled. However, i was not able to get a cover-page for my gitbook.
I did the exact code to put a png in images folder under the root directory for the book.
Could someone guide me how to get a book cover compiled.
thank you
Ram
Hi @Ram,
It's really difficult to say what's going on without some code. Could you please include a snippet with how you've got the path to the image setup. Also, assuming you are hosting this on GitHub, the link might help as well.
Thanks!
Hi @mara
Thank you for your reply. As it did not work for me on a local computer, I did not push it to git hub and now I am on a different machine. But I attach a screenshot of my root folder (last version). In the images folder, I had put a .png file. And then in yaml metadata of my index.Rmd, I said : cover-image: "images/cover.png" with the same indent level as title and author etc. Are there any size specifications for the image?
I am always confused where the metadata should be, in _output.yml or bookdown.yml or index.Rmd 
Thank you again
Ram
It sounds like the cover-image YAML option is for media previews of the site.
A nice effect of setting description and cover-image is that when you share the link of your book on some social network websites such as Twitter, the link can be automatically expanded to a card with the cover image and description of the book. https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/html.html#gitbook-style
The bookdown book manually inserts the cover into index.Rmd with
```{r fig.align='center', echo=FALSE, include=identical(knitr:::pandoc_to(), 'html'), fig.link='https://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781138700109'}
knitr::include_graphics('images/cover.jpg', dpi = NA)
```
(The include chunk option says to include the output of this chunk when the output format is HTML.)
hi @tjmahr
Thank you for the reply. I probably do not understand you clearly. I followed your suggestion and added the r code in the beginning of my document in index.Rmd like so...
```{r fig.align='center', echo=FALSE, include=identical(knitr:::pandoc_to(), 'html'), }
knitr::include_graphics('cover.png', dpi = NA)
my cover.png is in the root directory of the book project, so I just write the filename (cover.png), but it does not show up in my gitbook.
Could you clarify a bit more on your response.
Thank you
Ram
It looks like the cover art is inserted manually in the bookdown example. knitr::include_graphics() is one way to insert images. You can also try to just insert the image manually with an image tag in markdown.
