Comicbox

A comic book archive metadata reader and writer.

✨ Features

📚Comic Formats

Comicbox reads CBZ, CBR, CBT, and optionally PDF. Comicbox archives and writes CBZ archives and PDF metadata.

🏷️ Metadata Formats

Comicbox reads and writes:

• ComicRack ComicInfo.xml v2.1 (draft) schema,
• Comic Book Lover ComicBookInfo schema
• CoMet schema.
• PDF Metadata.
  • Embedding ComicInfo.xml inside PDFS.
• A variety of filename schemes that encode metadata.

Usefulness

Comicbox's primary purpose is a library for use by Codex comic reader. The API isn't well documented, but you can infer what it does pretty easily here: comicbox.comic_archive as the primary interface.

The command line is increasingly useful and can read and write metadata recursively and extract pages.

Limitations and Alternatives

Comicbox does not use popular metadata database APIs or have a GUI!

Comictagger is a popular alternative. It does most of what Comicbox does but also automatically tags comics with the ComicVine API and has a desktop UI.

📦 Installation

pip install comicbox

Comicbox supports PDFs as an extra when installed like:

pip install comicbox[pdf]

Dependencies

Comicbox generally works without any binary dependencies but requires unrar be on the path to convert CBR into CBZ or extract files from CBRs.

⌨️ Usage

Console

Type

comicbox -h

see the CLI help.

Examples

comicbox test.cbz -m "{Tags: a,b,c, story_arcs: {d:1,e:'',f:3}" -m "Publisher: SmallComics" -w cr

Will write those tags to comicinfo.xml in the archive.

Be sure to add spaces after colons so they are detected as valid YAML key value pairs. This is easy to forget.

But it's probably better to use the --print action to see what it's going to do before you actually write to the archive:

comicbox test.cbz -m "{Tags: a,b,c, story_arcs: {d:1,e:'',f:3}" -m "Publisher: SmallComics" -p

A recursive example:

comicbox --recurse -m "publisher: 'SC Comics'" -w cr ./SmallComicsComics/

Will recursively change the publisher to "SC Comics" for every comic found in under the SmallComicsComics directory.

Escaping YAML

the -m command line argument accepts the YAML language for tags. Certain characters like \,:;_()$%^@ are part of the YAML language. To successful include them as data in your tags, look up "Escaping YAML" documentation online

Deleting Metadata

To delete metadata from the cli you're best off exporting the current metadata, editing the file and then re-importing it with the delete previous metadata option:

# export the current metadata
comicbox --export cix "My Overtagged Comic.cbz"
# Adjust the metadata in an editor.
nvim comicinfo.xml
# Check that importing the metadata will look how you like
comicbox --import comicinfo.xml -p "My Overtagged Comic.cbz"
# Delete all previous metadata from the comic (careful!)
comicbox --delete "My Overtagged Comic.cbz"
# Import the metadata into the file and write it.
comicbox --import comicinfo.xml --write cix "My Overtagged Comic.cbz"

Quirks

The comicbox.yaml format represents the ComicInfo.xml Web tag as an identifiers.url tag. Fear not, you don't have to remember this. The CLI accepts heterogeneous tag types with the -m option, so you can type:

comicbox -p -m "Web: https://foo.com" mycomic.cbz

and the identifier tag should appear in comicbox.yaml as:

identifiers:
  nss: foo.com
  url: https://foo.com

Packages

Comicbox actually installs three different packages:

• comicbox The main API and CLI script.
• comicfn2dict A separate library for parsing comic filenames into dicts it also includes a CLI script.
• pdffile A utility library for reading and writing PDF files with an API like Python's ZipFile

⚙️ Config

comicbox accepts command line arguments but also an optional config file and environment variables.

The variables have defaults specified in a default yaml

The environment variables are the variable name prefixed with COMICBOX_. (e.g. COMICBOX_COMICINFOXML=0)

Log Level

change logging level:

LOGLEVEL=ERROR comicbox -p <path>

🛠 Development

You may access most development tasks from the makefile. Run make to see documentation.

🤔 Motivation

I didn't like Comictagger's API, so I built this for myself as an educational exercise and to use as a library for Codex comic reader.

📋 Schemas

Comicbox supports reading and writing several comic book metadata schemas.

Filename Schema

Comicbox includes a pretty good comic archive filename parser. It can extract a number of common fields from comic archive filenames.

Location	Name
Archive	The archive filename
Import/Export	comicbox-filename.txt

PDF Schema

The pdf metadata standard. Can be exported as an xml file or written directly to the pdf itself.

Adobe PDF Namespace Adobe PDF Standard § 14.3.3 Document Information Dictionary

PDF metadata is only read or written from and to PDF files.

Location	Name
Archive	PDF internal
Import/Export	pdf-metadata.xml

Reading Embedded Metadata from keywords

Comicbox will read most any metadata standard it supports from the keywords field. If that fails it will consider the keywords field as a comma delimited "Tags" field.

Writing ComicInfo.xml to keywords

By default Comicbox will write ComicInfo XML to the keywords field (e.g. -w pdf)

Codex supports this because it uses Comicbox. Other comic readers do not support PDF embedded ComicInfo.xml, but since they already have ComicInfo.xml parsers it's possible that they might someday.

If Comicbox JSON is included in the write formats (e.g. -w pdf,json) Comicbox will write comicbox.json to the keywords field instead. It is unlikely that any other comic reader other than Codex will ever support this.

CoMet Schema

An old and uncommon comic metadata standard from a defunct comic book reader.

CoMet Specification

Location	Name
Archive	comet.xml
Import/Export	comet.xml

ComicBookInfo Schema (Comic Book Lover)

The Comic Book Lover schema. A rare but still encountered JSON schema. It probably survives because Comictagger supports writing it.

ComicBookInfo

Location	Name
Archive	Zip & Rar Comments
Import/Export	comic-book-info.json

ComicInfo Schema (Comic Rack)

The Comic Rack schema. The de facto standard of comic book metadata. The Comic Rack reader is defunct, but the Anansi Project now publishes the ComicInfo spec and has compatibly and conservatively extended it.

Anansi ComicInfo v2.1 Spec Also, an unofficial, undocumented Mylar extension to ComicInfo.xml that encodes multiple Story Arcs and Story Arc Numbers as CSV values.

Location	Name
Archive	comicinfo.xml
Import/Export	comicinfo.xml

ComicTagger Schema

The most useful comic book metadata writer is ComicTagger. It supports the ComicVine API, is extensible to other APIs, and features a nice desktop GUI. Internally, Comictagger keeps a metadata object to work with the schemas it supports. This schema allows the import and export of that schema.

Comictaggger genericmetadata.py

This schema may only be useful to developers. The author of ComicTagger offers no promises as to the stability of this API and I am very lazy, so the chances of this drifting out of date are anyone's guess. It was included because it was easy to do.

Location	Name
Archive	comictagger.json
Import/Export	comictagger.json

Comicbox Schema

The comicbox internal data structure which acts as a superset of the above schemas to allow interpolating.

Comicbox JSON Schema

JSON Format

Location	Name
Archive	comicbox.json
Import/Export	comicbox.json

YAML Format

YAML is a superset of JSON, so the JSON schema applies here.

Location	Name
Archive	comicbox.yaml
Import/Export	comicbox.yaml

CLI Format

The Comicbox CLI uses "flow style" YAML, which is an all on one line format to enter metadata on the command line.

Specifying metadata on the command line like this is additive.

Location	Name
Comicbox CLI	-m --metadata
Archive	comicbox-cli.yaml
Import/Export	comicbox-cli.yaml

Environment variables

There is a special environment variable DEBUG_TRANSFORM that will print verbose schema transform information