metadata.md

Metadata

The Comic modules assume that the comic and all its data is in the Inkscape .svg file, as opposed to e.g., having a separate file for the transcript or even a database for additional information on a comic.

The metadata of a comic needs to be in the Description field in Inkscape. In Inkscape, click the "File" menu, then "Document Properties...", or press Ctrl + Alt + D. Go to the "Metadata" tab, then scroll down to the "Description" field.

While some other fields in the metadata like author and date could be used, most of them like title don't support multiple languages. Hence the Comic modules ignore all Inkscape metadata and instead only work with (you could say abuse) the description.

The description must be a JSON object. That means it must be included in curly braces, and then the metadata is given as keys and values, like this:

{
    "title": {
        "English": "Karma",
        "Deutsch": "Karma"
    },
    "published": {
        "when": "2023-01-31",
        "where": "web"
    }
}

The title is most important: if a comic doesn't have a title for a given language (or if the title is empty or contains only spaces), it doesn't exist in that language. When code processes a comic, it always asks for the comic's language by looking at the title metadata. This is a convenient mechanism to keep a language out: When you want to support a new language, you can already translate and add everything except the title, and only when all comics are available in that language and you're ready to go, add the titles.

Titles must be unique in their languages, i.e., you cannot have two comics with the same title in the same language. It's ok to have the same comic have the same title in different languages.

The published.where field tells where the comic is published. It allows keeping all your comics in one folder, but still excluding some from your web page, for example, if they were magazine contributions. "web" is a special location indicating your website. Besides that, you can use any names you like. In particular, this should not be a domain name for a web comic, as you'd probably need a different one for each language. Just use something like "web" or "that cool magazine" or "my buddy's web page". Output generators and templates may ignore comics not published in the "right" location, in particular checking for "web".

The published.when date must be an ISO 8601 formatted date (without time), that is a four-digit year, a dash, a two-digit month, another dash, and the two-digit day. For example, 2023-10-01 is October 1st in 2023. This date is used to check if the comic is already published. Many output generators that build your website will ignore a comic that is not yet published.

The example above shows the minimum metadata needed. Different check and output modules will use different metadata fields; see the respective documentation on what they expect.

You are free to create additional metadata as needed, for example, to put a link on the comic's web page. Generators ignore unknown metadata. However, avoid names that have characters other than english letters, digits, and underscores. Perl's toolkit may get confused.