Setting up Pluck-Comics on Windows

View this article as: [ xml / txt ]

Plucker excels at gathering and distilling news content for reading on the go, but how many out there are still carrying around that daily newspaper for the comics? Come on, hands up. Well, now, thanks to pluck-comics, you don't have to. This utility will allow you to grab comic strips from the net and prepare them for pluckering.

Since version 1.1, the full distribution of Plucker has included the pluck-comics tool, however, many users may not know that this program exists because it has no graphical interface. This short tutorial will show you how to install andconfigure this program under Windows.

Download it

Because pluck-comics doesn't directly interact with Plucker-Desktop or any of the distillers, it is not distributed in these packages, but must be downloaded separately. You can find it in the source code package or by browsing the CVS (it is in the tools subfolder). The pluck-comics folder will contain the program file (pluck-comics.py.in) and a number of 'list' files which hold the information about the comic strips. Save this folder to a memorable place, you will need to know this later.

Setup

1. Rename the file pluck-comics.py.in to pluck-comics.py
2. Edit pluck-comics.py.
3. Look for @COMICS_DIR@. Replace this with the name of the directory where you want the comics to be saved.
4. Replace @COMICSLIST_DIR@ with the name of the directory where you put the list files.
5. Avoid spaces in directory names as this may cause problems.

Running the Program

At this point, we'll create a simple 'batch' file which will allow us to run pluck-comics with a single mouse click. Open Notepad and paste the following text into it (edit where applicable), then save the file as 'pluck-comics.bat' in your pluck-comics directory.

 SET PLUCKERHOME=C:\Program Files\Plucker REM ## Change this line to the directory where you saved REM ## the pluck-comics program and list files. SET COMICSHOME=C:\Program Files\Plucker\parser\tools\pluck-comics REM ## Modify the following line to change what comics are REM ## downloaded. Here are some options you can use REM ## -h : Creates an HTML home page (required) REM ## -r X : Download X number of random comics REM ## -a : Download ALL comics (BIG!!) REM ## -d : Delete old comics REM ## REM ## You can also append the 'short name' of a comic to REM ## explicitly get a specific comic. Browse the list REM ## files for the possibilities. REM ## REM ## The example below will delete the old comics, download REM ## 25 random comics, Calvin And Hobbes, Ziggy, and create REM ## the home page. SET OPTIONS=-h -d -r 25 calvinandhobbes ziggy @echo on "%PLUCKERHOME%\parser\python\vm\python.exe" "%COMICSHOME%\pluck-comics.py" %OPTIONS% 

Now double-click this file to run the program. Check to make sure you get some comics in the directory you set @COMICS_DIR@ to.

Creating the Channel

Finally, create a channel with Plucker Desktop and set the start page to the home page which pluck-comics makes. In my example above, this is C:\TEMP\comics\index.html.

On the spidering tab in the Command executions section, put the path and filename of the batch file created in the previous step. In my example this is "C:\Program Files\Plucker\parser\tools\pluck-comics\pluck-comics.bat" (include quotes).

Now, every time this channel is updated, pluck-comics will automatically download the comics you specified and prepare them for you. Enjoy!