comicbox 0.10.1

An API for reading comic archives

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),
  • Also, an unofficial, undocumented Mylar extension to ComicInfo.xml that encodes multiple Story Arcs and Story Arc Numbers as CSV values.
• ComicBookInfo format
• CoMet format.
• PDF Metadata.
• 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" -m "Publisher=SmallComics" -w cr

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

⚙️ 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.