Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
144 lines (124 loc) · 7.47 KB

comic_addition.md

File metadata and controls

144 lines (124 loc) · 7.47 KB

Adding a new comic

This is a guideline for adding a new comic plugin.

Structure

A subfolder with a unique, well recognisable ("sounding") identifier name must be created in the plugins folder. This identifier must comprise only alphanumerical and lowercase characters.

Example 1

plugins/
  <comic-id-name>/
    cover.jpg
    example.jpg
    extract.js
    info.json

Required information

  • List of authors (past / present, scenarist / cartoonist / etc.)
  • Homepage which provides more information about the comic
  • Comic main, representative colour (e.g. homepage colour, typical scenery colour, typical character colour)
  • Language used in the comic strips
  • Source where to extract a link to the latest strip (e.g. RSS, API, URL)

This information must be provided in a JSON file named info.json.

Example 2

{
  "name": "CommitStrip",                                 // Display name
  "color": "2a3f6a",                                     // Colour in hexadecimal "HTML format"
  "language": "en",                                      // Language code
  "authors": [                                           //
    "Etienne Issartial",                                 // List of authors (may be a single one)
    "Thomas Gx"                                          //
  ],                                                     //
  "homepage": "https://www.commitstrip.com/",            // Homepage URL
  "stripSource": "https://www.commitstrip.com/en/feed/"  // Source URL for extracting the most recent strip
}

Comic cover

The cover image must be a file named cover.jpg.

Goal

The cover should be immediately recognisable when browsing the full list of comics.

Design

  • The cover image must be square (i.e. 1:1 aspect ratio).
  • The background must be a plain colour (i.e. no gradient etc.) and should be aforementioned comic's own colour.
  • The comic's name or its logo should be displayed on the center top of the cover image.
  • The foreground should contain the main character(s).

Technical

  • The format is JPEG.
  • Size is 300x300 pixels.
  • Try to minimise the file size, e.g. by removing metadata, using an appropriate compression factor (e.g. JPEG-quality: 90%; less usually creates compression artefacts, more just makes the file larger without visible improvement), etc.

Remarks

  • Ensure text (especially the comic's name / logo) is well readable when displayed in the settings page of Daily Comics.
  • The logo and the characters shall not overlap.
  • There should not be any other item shown than the logo and the main character(s).
  • Provide a strong contrast (colour and / or brightness) between the background colour to the logo and character.
  • The main character(s) is preferably shown in a characteristic posture.
  • Do not use shadows or other visual effects (at all, especially for the main character(s) or logo).
  • Preferably no object is present with the character(s) (unless common for the comic or helping define the comic).
  • The logo should be adapted to contain only the necessary parts (no tagline, background, author name, copyright / trademarks signs etc.).
  • The logo's colour may be changed, if it is monochrome, or if it is the same or a very similar colour as the comic's main colour.
  • Fully black or fully white are forbidden as a comic's main colour.
  • The main character(s), logo or other items depoicted may extend to the bottom of the cover (i.e. without leaving a border), but not to either side or the top.
  • If no main character exists, use a representative item or character.
  • If there are too many main characters, show only to the most well known ones / recognisable ones.
  • If the main colour is the colour of the main character, the main colour (and hence the background colour) should be darkened or lightened to provide sufficient contrast to the character.
  • The character(s) are preferably shown in full colour, even if they appear even only sometimes as such in the strips.

Example strip for a comic / cartoon

The example must be a file named example.jpg.

Goal

The example strip should give users that do not know this comic an idea of its usual content.

Choice

The example strip should be characteristic of the comic with regard to format, drawing style and topic.

Technical

  • The format is JPEG.
  • Remove unnecessary, surrounding parts (e.g. a frame) of the strip.
  • Maximum width and height is 600 pixels.
  • Try to minimise the file size, e.g. by removing metadata, using an appropriate compression factor (e.g. JPEG-quality: 90%; less usually creates compression artefacts, more just makes the file larger without visible improvement), etc.

Remark

Ensure that text is well readable when displayed in Daily Comics.

Extraction script

The script must be a file named extract.js.

This script is used to extract the current strip URL from the source as defined in the information.
The Javascript code needs to comprise a single function with a single parameter.
That function will be called with the content provided by the source URL.
It must return a string with an absolute or relative (to the stripSource) URL to the most recent strip.

Examples 3, 4 and 5

function(page) {
    var regex = /<img[^>]*src="([^"]*\/wp-content\/uploads\/[^"]*)"/;
    var match = regex.exec(page);
    return match[1];
}

function(page) {
    var regex = /class=["']?ABCD.*<img[^>]*src=["']?([^ "']*)/;
    var match = regex.exec(page);
    return match[1];
}

function(page) {
    var regex = /<a\sclass="ga-tracking\sjs-episode\s+"(.|\s)+?href="([^"]+)"/
    var match = regex.exec(page);
    var url = "https://tapas.io" + match[2]
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open("GET", url , false);
    xhr.send(null);
    if(xhr.status === 200)
    {
        var newPage = xhr.responseText;
        var regex2 = /<img\s*src="([^"]*)"\sclass="content__img"/
        var match2 = regex2.exec(newPage);
        return match2[1];
    }
}

Additional requirements

  • Denote in the git commit message which (re)source URLs were used for the cover and example strip.
  • Provide a higher resolution cover image (1000x1000 px²) in the comic's plugin folder with name cover_big.jpg.
  • For keeping "original graphic material" (i.e. not format-converted or scaled, but freed of author names, copyright notices, superfluous graphic elements etc.) for cover and example images, please commit such image files to .xdata/plugins, because of issue #65.
  • Regenerate the comic covers grid with the resources/generate_covers_grid.sh shell script.
  • Regenerate the comics list with the resources/generate_list.sh shell script.
  • If necessary, update the prefixes to ignore for sorting comic names in the Comic class and in the resources/generate_list.sh script.

Note

Mind that an extracted comic strip URL (rsp. the image proper) may use another format than JPEG, e.g. PNG, WEBP or GIF (for animated comics), SVG etc.; for details see [1] and [2].