Editing your Comic Info - ryanvilbrandt/comic_git GitHub Wiki
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âšī¸ Quickstart Tip
If you're setting up comic_git for the first time, and you just want to get started quickly without delving into all comic_git's features, you will only need to edit the [Comic Info] section.
When setting up your web comic, there are some important things you need to do to identify your comic, like give it a name or define what links go in the Links Bar. comic_git also supports a few extra features that can be enabled for your project, like automatically generating thumbnails for your comic pages. All these settings can be adjusted in the your_content/comic_info.ini file.
This file is a standard INI file that you may have seen elsewhere, if you've ever edited config files for other programs. Its format is very simple: it consists of pairs of options and their values (e.g. Title = Sample Comic), and these options are separated into sections (e.g. [Comic Info]).
Each of the sections and their options are described in more detail below. Some of the options may not show up in the comic_info.ini that comes with comic_git. These are optional (and will have (optional) in the name), meaning if you don't define them in your comic_info.ini file, comic_git will assume these have a default value, as defined in the description for that option.
Quick Links
- Comic Info
- Comic Settings
- Pages
- Links Bar
- Archive
- Image Reprocessing
- RSS Feed
- Transcripts
- Google Analytics
This is the name of your comic. The comic name shows up in the tab every time a page from your website is loaded. (e.g. Page 202 - Sample Comic). It does not have to match the name you gave your repository.
Whatever name or credit you wish to give for the creation of your comic. It can be a single name, a list of names, a sentence, whatever you want. It's currently only used when generating your RSS Feed.
A short, one-sentence description of your web comic. This will show up in your RSS feed and social media previews.
This is the date format that all your comic Post dates will be in. By default, they're similar to July 20, 1969. It's necessary that all Post dates use the same format, so that comic_git knows how to organize your posts chronologically.
The following table is a list of common date format strings. You can copy/paste any of these into the Date format option to change what date format to use in your comic files. (See Adding Comic Pages for more info on setting the Post dates for your comics)
| Format string | Example |
|---|---|
| %B %d, %Y | July 16, 1969 |
| %Y-%m-%d | 1969-07-16 |
| %a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S | Wed, 16 Jul 1969 04:20:00 |
You can also build your own format strings. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html#time.strftime for the list of %-substitutions you can use.
The timezone for all the dates in your comic. This is important for when comic_git is determining when scheduled posts should be published. For example, if you push out an update at 9pm your time just before the midnight deadline, you don't want comic_git to publish the page right away just because it's past midnight in some other timezone!
All timezones found in the "TZ database name" column on this page are allowed.
When set to true, this will replace the First, Previous, Next, and Latest navigation links on the comic pages with the icons found at your_content/images/navigation_icons/. You can change which icons are used by replacing these files with your own, or change this setting to false to just use text links.
If you are building your website locally, and you haven't configured a custom domain, you must set this so that comic_git knows what domain to use to build the URL to link to your comic, for the purposes of things like your RSS feed and your social media preview links. For more details, see Building your Website on your own PC.
This option should include your website's entire domain, subdomain, and top-level domain. Do not include the slash at the end. You may include the "http://" or "https://" if you wish.
Examples: http://ryanvilbrandt.github.io, www.tamberlanecomic.com
If you are building your website locally, and you have not set a custom domain, you must set this to the name of your GitHub repository. This allows most of the links on your website to function properly. For more details, see Building your Website on your own PC.
This option should not include leading or trailing slashes.
Examples: comic_git, tamberlane
If you are building your website locally, or you've set up a custom domain, setting this to True will force any URLs pointing to your website to use https:// instead of http://.
The name of the theme to use for your site. If not included or left blank, comic_git will use the default theme.
For more information, see Themes.
A comma-separated list of any extra comics hosted on your site. For more information, see Extra Comics.
This option tells comic_git where to go to find the banner image for the comic, that big image that goes at the top of every page in the default comic_git website layout. The default value for this option is /your_content/images/banner.png.
By default, comic_git relies on the Filename option provided in each comic's info.ini file to know what image file to use for the comic page (see Adding Comic Pages). If the Filename is not provided in this case, comic_git will raise an error and fail to build your website.
If this option is set to True, and Filename is missing from the comic's info.ini file, comic_git will look in the comic page's directory for any image files. If it finds only one image file (aside from thumbnail.jpg), it will assume that is the image file it should use for the comic page. If there are no image files in the directory, or more than one image file in the directory, comic_git will raise an error.
If you never store more than one image in a comic page's directory, this is a useful option to set, because it will save you the trouble of updating the Filename of your info.ini file every time you upload a new comic page.
If you wish to store multiple image files in a comic page's directory, you can define Filename in just that comic's info.ini file, and comic_git will use that value instead of attempting to auto-detect the image.
Image files are any files with the following extensions: jpg, jpeg, png, tif, tiff, gif, bmp, webp, webv, svg, eps
By default, if you don't give a comic page a Storyline value in its info.ini file, it will be placed in an "Uncategorized" section in your Archive page below all your other comic pages. If you wish for these Uncategorized pages to just not show up on your Archive page, set this value to False.
This is a special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git what extra web pages beyond the standard comic pages to build. To the left of the equals sign is the template file name to use, to the right is the title of the page once it's built. If you wish to remove a default web page like tagged pages or the Latest page, delete that line from this section.
For more info on adding pages to your website, see Themes.
This is another special section without pre-defined options. This section tells comic_git how to build out the Links Bar. To the left of the equals sign is the name of the link as it should show up on the website, to the right is the URL it links to. Any values that start with / will link to a page on your website. All other links will be treated as external links to other websites.
When this value is False, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in an unordered list, broken up by storyline. When this value is True, the Archive page will display all the comics in your archive in a grid of comic thumbnails. When looking for thumbnails, the Archive page look in each comic directory for a thumbnail image by the name of thumbnail.jpg
You can either create your own thumbnails, or use comic_git's built-in thumbnail generation, described in the [Image Reprocessing] section below.
This is the format that post dates will be displayed in when Use thumbnails is set to True. This is defined separately because longer post dates can screw up the spacing of the thumbnails in the grid. It accepts the same inputs as the Date format in the [Comic Settings] section.
If set to True, thumbnails will be generated for each comic page, named thumbnail.jpg.
The size of the thumbnail to be generated. This can be a width/height pair in pixels like 100, 36, a percentage of the size of the original image like 10%, a set height in pixels (100h), or a set width in pixels (100w). For the latter two options, comic_git will keep the aspect ratio of the original image the same, adjusting to fit just your defined height or width.
If this is set to False, and a thumbnail already exists in the comic page's folder, comic_git will not attempt to recreate the thumbnail. If set to True, comic_git will always attempt to generate a thumbnail, assuming creating these files is enabled via one of the options above.
If set to True, comic_git will attempt to create a Transcripts section below every comic that has transcripts files provided for it. A transcript file is a text file with the name of the language as its filename, e.g. English.txt. The transcript file can contain plain text, unicode (for those fancy accents and non-roman alphabets), HTML tags, and Markdown.
If defined, any transcript *.txt file will be moved to the top of the list of transcripts, and thus will automatically be loaded whenever the comic page is loaded. The default value for this is "English".
If this setting is True, comic_git will search in each comic page's folder for any *.txt files (except for post.txt) and any it finds it will add to the list of available transcripts for that comic page. The default value for this is True.
If you wish to move the transcripts to their own folder, you can define that folder here. Each page must have a separate folder that matches the comic folder name. For example, if you set the transcripts folder to be your_content/transcripts, then the transcript files for Page 197 should be found at your_content/transcripts/Page 197/. This path is always relative to the root of the repository.
Both this setting and "Load transcripts from comic folder" can be set, so you can have transcripts in both places. In that case, transcript files in your custom transcripts folder will be used instead of transcript files in your comic folder, if they share the same name.
If you have set up a Google Analytics for your comic, you can put the Tracking ID here (e.g. UA-123456789-0) and comic_git will automatically insert the analytics tracking code on all pages of your website.