Comics Project Management Tools Plugin Manual

# Comics Project Management Tools

### Version 3

This is the Comics Project Management Tools python plugin for Krita.

CPMT aims to simplify comics creation by:

- Giving the artist a way to organize and quickly access their pages.
- Helping the artist(s) deal with the boring bits meta data bits of a comic project by giving a meta-data editor that gives suggestions, explanation and occasionally a dab of humor.
- Making export set-and-forget type of affair where a single click can export to multiple formats with proper meta-data.

Export-wise, CPMT aims to support:

Advanced Comic Book Format
  An open comics format that has detailed markup as well as support for translations.
CBZ
  the most popular comic file format, with the following meta-data schemes:
  - ACBF - as above.
  - CoMet.xml
  - ComicBookInfo (Spec is unclear so not 100% certain)
  - ComicInfo.xml(Comic Rack)
Epub
  The epub publishing format. Not the most ideal format for handling comics, but most readers can open epub.

## Table of Contents:

## Usage - quick-start guide:

First, get the comic manager docker(settings → dockers → comic Management Docker). There, select New Project.

It will show a dialog asking for:

The project directory.
  This is where everything will be written to.
Concept
  so a simple sentence explaining what you want to write the comic about. This concept is just for you.
Project name.
  This is not the title, but more of a code name which will be used to create pages. For the impatient artist there is even a generator that produces code names.
Language
  The main language, used for all the meta data. By default set to the system locale.
Make a new directory with the project name.
  Whether to make a new project directory inside the selected directory. This allows you to have a generic comics directory that you always select and that CPMT will make directories named with the project name inside.
Pages
  The name for the directory to store the pages. This is where new pages are placed.
Export
  The name for the directory to store the export. This is where the comic will be exported to.
Templates
  The name for the directory to store the template. This is where the page templates get stored.
Translations
  The translations directory is where the POT file will be stored and where the exporter searches for translation(PO) files.

It will also allow you to edit meta data if you'd want already, but this is not mandatory.

Since version 3 the project is immediately opened in the docker. If you wish to work on an older project, select Open Project, go to the location where you have stored your comics project. There should be a “comicsConfig.json” file there, next to the new folders for the pages, templates and export. Open that.

Now, click Add Page to add your first page. You will get a dialog asking for the template. Here you can generate one, or import one. CPMT will remember this as the default one.

Double click the new page to open in Krita.

The second column in the docker allows you to see the “subject” line in the document info if it's filled in.

You can press the arrow next to Add Page to get more features, like Add Existing Page, Remove Page, or Batch Resize.

## Usage - Meta Data

You can edit the meta data by clicking the dropdown next to Project Settings and selecting Meta Data.

There's quite a few fields here, because there's quite a few different types of meta data. Hover over the fields to get an idea of what needs to be typed.

The meta data is intended to be filled out over the course of the project, so don't worry too much if you cannot instantly think of what a certain entry should be.

The meta data fields have auto completion wherever sensible. You can add your own meta data fields as noted in the following section:

### Adding extra auto-completion keys.

First, you need to go to project settings, and there point the extra keys to a folder where extra keys can be found.

It will search that extra folder for the following folders:

- key_genre
- key_format
- key_rating
- key_characters
- key_author_roles
- key_other

You can add extra auto-completion keys by adding a text file with each new key on a separate line to one of the “key” folders. The name of the text file doesn't matter. This way you can add characters by universe, or archive specific keywords by archive name.

So for example, the following file has three superhero names on different lines, nothing more, nothing less.

     Spider-Man
     Hawkeye
     Jean Grey

When you then store it as marvel.txt put into the directory “key_characters”, Krita will use the names from the list as suggestion for the character field in the meta-data.

The exception is the key_ratings, which uses CSV files, using the top row to determine the title, and then has the rating in the first column, and the description on the second. This allows the description to show up as tool-tips.

### The Author list

The author list is a table containing all the authors of the project. It allows a distinction between given, family, middle and nickname, as well as role, email and homepage.

You can rearrange the author list by drag and dropping the number at the left, as well as adding and removing authors.

Adding an author will always add “John Doe”. You can double click the names and cells to change their contents. For the role, there are auto completion keys, so to encourage using standardized ways to describe their roles.

In the main docker, there's an option under the pages actions called Scrape Authors, this will make the comics project docker search the pages in the pages list for author info and append that to the author list. It will not attempt to check for duplicates, so be sure to the list afterwards.

## Usage - Project Settings

The project settings allows you to change all the technical details of the project:

- the project name
- the concept
- the location of pages, export and templates
- the default template.
- the location of the extra auto-completion keys(see metadata)

## Usage - Pages

There's several other things you can do with pages. You can either access these feature by clicking the drop-down next to Add Page or right-clicking the pages list.

Adding pages
  You can add pages by pressing the Add Page button. The first time you press this, it'll ask for a template. After you create or select a template it will use this as the default. You can set the default in the project settings.
Adding pages from template:
  Adding pages from a template will always give the template dialog. This will allow you to have several different templates in the templates directory(it will show all the kra files in the templates directory), so that you can have spread, coverpages and other pages at your finger tips. The create template dialog will allow you to make a simple two layer image with a colored background, and rulers for the bleeds and guides. Import template will copy selected templates to the template directory, keeping all the necessary files inside the comics project.
Remove a page
  This allows you to remove the selected page in the list from the pages list. It does NOT delete the page from the disk.
Adding existing pages
  This is for when you wish to add existing pages, either because you removed the page from the list, or because you already have a project going and wish to add the pages to the list.
Batch Resize
  This will show a window with resize options. After selecting the right options, all the pages will be resized as such. A progress dialog will pop up showing you which pages have been done and how long it will take based on the passed time.
View Page in Window
  This will call up the comic viewer.
Scrape Authors
  This searches all the files from the pages list for author information and adds that to the author list. It will not check for copies, so you will need to clean up the author list yourself.
Scrape Text for Translations
  This triggers a script that will go over each page and take out certain text information it can find. It will use the 'text layer keys' in the export dialog to determine whether a vector layer's text ought to be considered. Then, when done, it will put the text it found into a POT file, together with translatable meta-data, like the comic title, and will save it in the translations folder. The POT file can then be used by translators(using something like PO edit) to create a PO file. The CPMT can in turn use the PO files in the creation of ACBF files which'll embed the translations.
Rearranging pages
  You can rearrange pages by drag and dropping the pages themselves.

### The Comic Viewer

When you rightclick the pages, or press the down button next to Add Page, There's the option View page in window.This will pop up a comic viewer, which is each page's mergedimage.png file(that is a preview of all visible layers merged), and you can flip through them. This is so that you can have a quick reference for a single page in the event your other referencing tools cannot open kra files.

First, Last
  These will set the viewer to the last or first page in the comic. The hotkeys for these are `Home` and `End` respectively. These buttons will switch position based on the reading direction configured for the comic.
Previous, Next
  These buttons allow you to switch spaces. The hotkeys for these are `←` and `→` respectively. You can also use `Space` to switch to the next page. These buttons will switch position based on the reading direction configured for the comic.
Spread, single
  This button will allow you to switch to single or spread mode.

You can also run the comic viewer standalone:

    python3 comics_project_page_viewer.py /path/to/your/comicConfig.json

## Usage - Copy Location

Copy location, the button underneath the export button, allows you to copy the current project location to clipboard. Just press it, and paste somewhere else. This is useful when using multiple programs and reference tools and you just want to quickly navigate to the project directory.

## Usage - Export

CPMT will not allow export without any export methods set.

You can configure the export settings by going to the drop-down next to Project Settings and selecting Export Settings.

Here you can define...

- how much a page needs to be cropped
- which layers to remove by layer color-label
- to which formats to export, in what file-format and how to resize.

Once you've done that, press export. Krita will pop up a progress bar for you with the estimated time and progress, so you can estimate how long you will have to wait.

CPMT will store the resized files and meta data in separate folders in the export folder. This is so that you can perform optimization methods afterwards and update everything quickly.

### ACBF

ACBF is the advanced comic book format. It is a metadata file that can hold extra data like panels and text, and can even store translations for the text.

When you generate a CBZ file, the ACBF file will be generated alongside of it. There's in fact two ACBF files being generated: The one in the metadata folder is the ACBF file as it is inside the CBZ. The other ACBF file, next to the CBZ is the standalonefile. This file has the pages embedded, but there's currently fewer viewers who can read it.

ACBF has a set amount of genres it can cover. This is the default list of genre auto completion keys. Genres outside that will be put into the extra keywords list for ACBF. On top of that, it does allow defining a match to this genre. To set a match to a genre, write a number in brackets indicating how much it matches this genre. So for example “Horror(60), Science Fiction(40)”will have Horror set to 60% and Science Fiction set to 40%. These values are normalized. So if you put in “Romance(550), Fantasy(650)”it will ensure that the two values will become percentages, leading to Romance being set to 46% and Fantasy set to 54%.

The CPMT has some support for frames and text export. If you name a vector layer “text” or “panels” it will search those for shapes. The shapes that are text nodes will be added to the ACBF file as a text in the main language of the comic, using the bounding box of the text-shape. The shapes that aren't text will have their bounding boxes used as frames. The order of frames and text is determined by the shape z-order in Krita, with the bottom shape being the first and the top shape being the last. You can customize these layer selection keys in the export settings dialog.

The CPMT also support translations. ACBF will use the PO files stored in the translations folder. In the export dialog, you can configure whether you want translation comments to be embedded. Then, if there's translation comments in the PO file, ACBF will put those in the reference section and add a link to the line with the translation comment. Translations will have translator note headers. You can configure these in the export, and they will also be put into the POT file when it is generated so they may be translated.

Finally, there's the styles and the text type. You can configure the styles in the export settings dialog tab for acbf. The exporter will use the configuration and alignment to automatically figure out the text-type in the export.

- Text that is justified will use the “formal”type. There's no method to currently make justified text, so this won't trigger until then
- Text that is centered will have it's font family compared to the existing styles and their font-families. If it finds a match that will be the type
- Text that is neither will be marked with “commentary”, that is, it is considered a narrative caption.

To fine tune the export to ACBF, you can go to file→document Information and add the following keywords:

acbf_title
  this will flag this page to be used as a table of contents bookmark inside ACBF. The content mark will use the “title” value in the document information to create a bookmark in the project language.
acbf_none
  Sets the page transition value to “none” explicitly.
acbf_fade
  Sets the page transitio to fade. Viewers that support it will fade to black into this page.
acbf_blend
  Sets the page transition to blend. Viewers that support it will fade the previous page to this one.
acbf_horizontal
  Sets the page transition to scroll_right. Viewers that support it will scroll right to a new page.
acbf_vertical
  Sets the page transition to scroll_down. Viewers that support it will scroll down to a new page.

### EPUB

EPUB stands for E-Publication and is a commonly supported e-reading format. The exporter can export comics appropriately. Because the tags and features required for comics support were not supported until EPUB 3, this exporter only exports EPUB 3. An EPUB 2 reader will be able to read these files as well, it just will not look as fancy.

EPUBs generated by the exporter will be pre-paginated, and will take the reading direction into account when assigning pages to left or right side of the spread.

The EPUB exporter will also generate a region-navigation document which'll allow conforming readers to use panel-by-panel navigation. Panels and frame export is, like with the ACBF exporter, determined by searching for a vector layer with the appropriate layer name. By default these names are “text” or “panels” and they can be configured in the export dialog.

Metadata wise, the creator and contributor roles use MARC relators for the role. The exporter will try to match the filled in role with either the official description or its MARC Relator code, and otherwise set it to "oth"(other).

The epub exporter will use the acbf_title keyword exactly like the ACBF exporter will, generating both a EPUB 3 and EPUB 2 style Table of Contents with them. Beyond that, there's the following keyword:

epub_spread
  This will mark the page as a spread(two pages next to one another), and thus, if a epub reading software puts pages next to one another, it'll try to avoid that with the spread.

## Version History

Because the comic project management tools are bundled with Krita you could argue that you can identify them that way, but here is a history anyway, so you can check what has changed.

Version 3 (Krita 4.2)
  Improved ComicBookInfo and ComicInfo.xml metadata files export. Improved EPUB export, with support for pre-pagination and region navigation, and improved handling of the metadata files. Also added warnings for trying to deal with unwritable folders, as well as opening the project after you create it.
Version 2 (Krita 4.1)
  90% ACBF support, with improved handling of text, translation support, new keys for genres and author roles, style sheets, text-type recognition, database ref, and background color support. The Comic Page viewer has been fully rewritten to handle flipping through the pages as well as made possible to be run standalone. Furthermore, the comic page viewer has gotten its own dedicated item delegate, meaning the page metadata is drawn nicely and drag and drop is less fiddly.
Version 1 (Krita 4.0)
  The initial tools, with project management, page management, meta data management complete with autocompletion keys, copy-location, export to epub, tiff, cbz, and export to zipfile info, ComicInfo.xml and CoMet.xml, and for ACBF support for panels, text and basic metadata. Other features include batch resize, page templates, and author data scraping.