This is the Comics Project Management Tools python plugin for Krita.
CPMT aims to simplify comics creation by:
Export-wise, CPMT aims to support:
First, get the comic manager docker(settings → dockers → comic Management Docker). There, select New Project.
It will show a dialog asking for:
It will also allow you to edit meta data if you'd want already, but this is not mandatory.
Then after you finish, 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.
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:
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:
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 GreyWhen 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 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.
The project settings allows you to change all the technical details of the project:
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.
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.
You can also run the comic viewer standalone:
python3 comics_project_page_viewer.py /path/to/your/comicConfig.jsonCopy 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.
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...
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 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.
To fine tune the export to ACBF, you can go to file→document Information and add the following keywords:
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:
+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.