๐Ÿ“‹ 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.

The filename parser is available as a separate library: comicfn2dict

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

ComicInfo Schema v2.1 Draft (Comic Rack)

This schema used by the defunct Comic Rack reader is the de facto standard for comic book metadata on the internet. The Anansi Project now maintains the ComicInfo Schema and has compatibly and conservatively extended it.

ComicInfo StoryArcs

Comicbox also supports 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

MetronInfo Schema v1.1

The MetronInfo Schema is a new XML schema for comic book metadata, which hopes to improve some of the deficiencies that exist with the ComicInfo.xml schema.

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

Metron MangaVolume

The MangaVolume tag is interpreted not as an arbitrary string, but as a range of integers delineated by a “-“. e.g “1-3”.

Metron CommunityRating

The v1.1 CommunityRating tag maps to the comicbox community_rating object: AverageRating to community_rating.average_rating (which ComicInfo CommunityRating and ComicBookInfo rating also map to) and RatingCount to community_rating.rating_count (which no other format carries).

Metron AlternativeNumber

The v1.1 AlternativeNumber tag records a legacy or alternate numbering of the same issue. It maps to the comicbox alternative_issue object, which is parsed into name, number and suffix parts just like issue.

ComicBookInfo Schema v1.0 (Comic Book Lover)

The schema used by the defunct Comic Book Lover app. It supports a few useful tags that ComicInfo.xml does not, but it probably only survives because Comictagger supports writing it.

I have interpreted the ComicBookInfo example json into a ComicBookInfo JSON Schema.

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

ComicBookInfo Role primary attribute

Comicbox discards the attribute.

PDF XMP Schema

The PDF metadata standard. Written directly to the pdf itself or exported as an xml file.

Adobe PDF Namespace Adobe PDF Standard ยง 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

Embedding other Metadata Formats in PDF

Comicbox will read and write all the comic metadata file formats it supports for other kinds of comic archives to PDF embedded files. Comicbox used to optionally nest this data in the PDF keywords field. Reading other comic metadata from the PDF keywords fields is still supported. Otherwise the keywords fields is transformed to and from the “Tags” field.

CoMet Schema v1.1 (Comic Viewer)

An old and extremely rare comic metadata standard from the defunct Comic Viewer comic book reader.

I have interpreted the CoMet Specification into a CoMet XSD.

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

Comicbox 2.0 Schema

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

Comicbox 2.0 JSON Schema

Comicbox JSON Format

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

Comicbox YAML Format

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

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

Comicbox 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