Quiet Comic

A simple webcomic theme with pagination support for your comic pages and any related art.

Installation

Add this line to your Jekyll site's Gemfile:

gem "quiet-comic"

Then copy the theme's default _config.yml into your Jekyll site's _config.yml, and then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install quiet-comic

Usage

Getting Started

This gem ships with a start-up script that copies over the following files and folders into your project directory:

+- _config.yml
+- _pages/
+- _artworks/
+- assets/
+- pages_feed.xml
+- artworks_feed.xml
+- combined_feed.xml

To run the script:

bundle exec quiet-comic-setup

This will give you a base config file to work out from, the necessary folders (with demo files) for your pages and artworks collection, some demo images in assets so you can see thumbnail generation (with jekyll-minimagick) in action, and the feed templates jekyll requires to build a pages, artworks, and combined feed.

You probably only want to run this script on a fresh project, because it may override any existing files and folders with the same name, that you may have modified/worked on, if you let it. But the script will prompt you before copying each file, so you can feel free to skip some files while copying over others, should you want to 'reset' any file after messing something up.

Configuration

Please copy and paste the theme's default _config.yml file into your own and customize any of the variables you wish.

Layouts

The layouts are:

  • default.html - base layout for all layouts. Sets the doctype, <head> element, and a header include.
  • home.html - landing page with a full screen div for your beautiful cover art
  • page.html - a single comic page
  • artwork.html - a single artwork page
  • autopage_collection.html - this is used by the AutoPages feature of the jekyll-paginate-v2 gem to generate a paginated index for comic pages as well as artworks (or any collections you care to add to your website)
  • post.html - a very minimal layout for blog posts. If you really want proper blog posts on your website, make sure to override and style this layout properly (blog posts are not the focus of this theme, however - jekyll just provides this functionality by default)

To override these layouts, create a _layouts directory and a new file with the name corresponding to the layout you want to override (eg. _layouts/home.html).

Includes

  • head.html - defines the <head></head> tag used in the default layout
  • seo.html - bunch of tags for SEO included in head.html
  • header.html - defines the site's main header with a responsive navbar
  • footer.html - site's footer with author bio and social media links (links will show up only if you specify a link to your social media sites in _config.yml)
  • google-analytics - code analytics inserted in the default layout (only active in production)
  • comments - code for facebook comment box
  • facebook_javascript_sdk.html - code for including the Facebook Javascript SDK in the default layout
  • collection_feed.xml - used to generate an Atom feed for each of your collections. You need to create a <collection>_feed.xml in your root folder for the feed file to be generated

Sass

To override the Sass in this theme, create a _sass directory and add your desired sass files. Then, create a assets/main.scss file and import your files as well as the theme's stylesheet:

@import 'myfile';
\\ ... import your sass files above to override theme defaults
@import 'quiet-comic';

Collections

Pages

You should at minimum include the following font matter in your page:

---
page_number: 1
image: 'path/to/comic/strip/image'
---

Your pages will be sorted on the page_number variable so it must be included.

The page_number will be displayed on the page itself, and, depending on your config, in the pages index on the thumbnail for that page (see how to generate your thumbnail images here).

The image should be the path to the comic strip file itself, relative to the base image directory. The base image directory for comic pages is <base_image_dir>/pages. Since the default base image directory is assets/images, this will be assets/images/pages. If you would like to change the base directory name, you can set the following in your config:

base_image_dir: '/new/path/to/images/directory'

You can optionally include a title, date key (it's recommended), and this will be displayed on the page alongside the page_number.

You can specify whether you want the thumbnail label to show the page_number or the title by setting the following key in your _config.yml (page_number is the default):

thumbnail_label: "page_number" # or "title"

Likewise, you can specify whether the feed <title></title> tag in each feed <entry> should show the page_number or the title by setting the following in your _config.yml (page_number is the default):

feed_label: "page_number" # or title

Note that if you don't have a title key specified in your frontmatter, the page.title variable defaults to the name of your file (which may or may not be what you expect).

Chapters

Artworks

Your frontmatter should at minimum include:

---
title: Some title
date: YYYY-MM-DD
image: "path/to/image/file"
---

The date is required to sort your artworks in chronological order (when displayed in the gallery page as well as in the feed). Note that it must be written in the YYYY-MM-DD ISO 8601 format for it to be recognized as a Date by Jekyll (or it will end up a string and sorting won't work as expected).

The image should be the path to the artwork file itself, relative to the base image directory. The base image directory for artworks is <base_image_dir>/artworks. Since the default base image directory is assets/images, this will be assets/images/pages. If you would like to change the directory name, you can set the following in your config:

base_image_dir: '/new/path/to/images/directory'

Thumbnails

This theme uses the jekyll-minimagick gem to automatically generate thumbnails for your comics or artworks based on your supplied configuration. By default you should put your comic page images into assets/images/pages and your artwork images into assets/images/artworks, and the thumbnails will be generated in the assets/images/pages/thumbnails and assets/images/artworks/thumbnails directories respectively. If you would like to change the default config, you can edit the mini_magick key in _config.yml:

# jekyll-minimagick config
mini_magick:
  pages_thumbnails:
    source: "assets/images/pages"
    destination: "assets/images/pages/thumbnails"
    crop: "300x300+0+0"
  artworks_thumbnails:
    source: "assets/images/artworks"
    destination: "assets/images/artworks/thumbnails"
    crop: "300x300+0+0"

(For the crop option, the value must be of the form width x height + x-offset + y-offset. The offsets are mandatory, or minimagick will throw an error)

Note that if you change the source directories, you should also make the relevant changes to the base_image_dir.

Feed

This theme uses the jekyll-feed gem to generate an Atom feed for your posts (feed.xml) (if you are running a blog alongside your web comic). However this gem does not support feed for collections.

This theme will create a feed for your comic pages (pages_feed.xml), artwork (artwork_feed.xml) and a combined feed for both (combined_feed.xml). The feed will sort your comic pages according to page_number, and your artworks according to date (so ensure that those variables are set in your frontmatter).

Syntax Highlighting

This theme uses rouge for syntax highlighting (which is Jekyll's default highlighter). The syntax highlighting stylsheet uses the Zenburn theme. To override the theme, create a _sass/syntax_highlighting.scss file, put in your desired styles, and import it before the quiet_comic stylesheet in assets/main.scss. You can find other syntax highlighting styles here: http://jwarby.github.io/jekyll-pygments-themes/languages/javascript.html.

SEO

A set of meta tags for SEO are included in <head></head>. To see what's included, check out the source file _includes/seo.html (Do bundle open quiet-comic to open the gem source). Config that affects the output of these SEO tags can be found in _config.yml.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/hello. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

Development

To set up your environment to develop this theme, run bundle install.

Your theme is setup just like a normal Jekyll site! To test your theme, run bundle exec jekyll serve and open your browser at http://localhost:4000. This starts a Jekyll server using your theme. Add pages, documents, data, etc. like normal to test your theme's contents. As you make modifications to your theme and to your content, your site will regenerate and you should see the changes in the browser after a refresh, just like normal.

When your theme is released, only the files in _layouts, _includes, _sass and assets tracked with Git will be bundled. To add a custom directory to your theme-gem, please edit the regexp in quiet-comic.gemspec accordingly.

TODO

  • [X] Write a setup script
  • [] Figure out image thumbnails in feed
  • [] Home page illustration
  • [] Six Comic pages
  • [] One artwork
  • [] Support grouping pages into chapters

License

The theme is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.