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Comics

Lets you publish web comics in different languages with a single command.

When I started my beer and brewing themed web comic, I wanted to publish my comics in both English (at beercomics.com) and German (at biercomics.de). I used Inkscape for the drawings because I wanted vector graphics for easy scaling (my first web comic back in the day was in .gif format,, and it looked like that in print). Most comics work in both English and German, they can be translated. So I put the languages in their respective layers, and show or hide one or the other when exporting. This works manually, but gets tedious when you have to remember to toggle layers and export to .png after each change. (You could just put .svg files on the web, which saves you the "export as" step but adds a "save as" step, so it's still the same work.)

Three strikes and you automate, as the Pragmatic Programmers said, so I wrote a little Perl script to flip layers and export for me. Of course I needed some html page around the comics, too, and wouldn't it be nice to provide a transcript of the comic for search engine optimization and for people with screen readers? Before I knew, my little Perl script was at 2500 lines and almost unmaintainable. Over the years I broke it up into more manageable modules, added automated tests, and improved design and documentation.

Assumptions

That said, there are still a few basic assumptions on how things work:

  • Everything is in the comic. The Inkscape .svg file is the "single source of truth". Everything needed for a comic is in that file, not in any other files, not in version control, not in a database of some sort, not in a microservice, and not in the blockchain. Most settings that are not specific to a particular comic are configured in global settings and in the templates used to generate outputs (see below).

  • Stuff needs to be in its place (layers and metadata). If everything is in the same file but needs to end up in different files per language, stuff needs to be somehow marked as belonging to a language (or none or all). This is done with Inkscape layers, and the layer names tell the Comics modules what to do with the layers (hide, show, get the transcript, and so on). Whatever doesn't go in a layer goes into the comic's metadata.

  • Generate everything. Since everything is in the comic's .svg, take that as input and generate whatever is needed: web pages, RSS feed, transcript, and so on. This is described in the outputs chapter. Most of the generated output depends on the templates you write.

  • Have the computer help check. If a computer already processes each comic, have it also check for e.g., spelling errors. This is described in the checks chapter.

  • Publish the comics. The assumption is that you have your own site and push a new comic e.g., every week. You don't need to run the web server on your own hardware, but have one you can access as you see fit. I don't recommend just tweeting or posting the comics to e.g., reddit. Being in charge of the server gives you more control. See the upload modules chapter for details. You can let the modules in the social media modules chapter post your comic to social media.

The previous steps imply that it doesn't matter where you keep the comic on your hard drive. They can be in one folder or in many (maybe nested) folders. If you want to exclude comics from getting published on your web page, for example, when they were exclusively for a book or magazine, that information also needs to live in the metadata. For example, to allow for different publication locations, the metadata supports a "published where" field. Generators may check for it and you can query that in templates (see the outputs chapter for details).

Workflow

After installing the Perl modules, configure your settings for all comics. Then run the conversion through the Comics main module:

# perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Comics;

Comics::generate('path/to/your/settings.json', "path/to/your/comics");

If you don't want to install the comic modules, you can also point the script to them by adding a line after the other uses like this:

use lib "path/to/the/top-level/folder";

You can call that script e.g., from a Unix cron job to automatically publish your latest comic.