layers.md

Layers

The Comic modules use layer names to know what layers to export, what layers have special meanings, and how to treat such layers.

The Comic modules distinguish these layers:

• Language layers hold language-dependent information, usually the texts in a comic, or drawings that are only applicable in that language. Their names must end in the language (starting with an uppercase letter), e.g., English, or BackgroundEnglish are recognized as layers for the English language.

• Extra transcript layers: the Comic::Out::Transcript module generates a transcript of the comic. It gets the texts from the language layers (as above). For a better transcript, you can add an extra layer per language that has texts describing what is going on in the comic. Naturally you don't want to export that layer in the image. To mark a layer as contributing to the transcript but not meant for the image, configure a TranscriptOnlyPrefix, then name these layers to start with that prefix and end in their language (as above).

• Background layers that don't contribute to the transcript: this is for per-language texts in the image that should not make it into the transcript. If you configure a NoTranscriptPrefix, the transcript collecting code will ignore all layers where the name starts with that prefix. If you don't configure this prefix, all layers contribute to the transcript.

• Frames layer: used by some checks and the transcript generator to figure out in which order texts should appear in the transcript. You can configure this with the Frames layer name setting. Defaults to "Frames".

All other layers (i.e., that don't end in a language or don't start with a configured prefix) are considered part of the image and are left untouched.

Here is an example configuration:

{
    "Layers": {
        "TranscriptOnlyPrefix": "Meta",
        "NoTranscriptPrefix": "Background",
        "Frames": "Frames"
    }
}

In the above example, any layer where the name starts with Meta will be hidden and not exported, but will be used for the transcript. Any layer starting with Background will be exported as usual, but its texts won't show up in the transcript. When ordering the texts, the code will look at the rectangles in the Frames layer.

Note that text outside of layers will be ignored for the transcript, but will get exported to the comic image if the layer is visible. This is probably not what you want, so the advice is to keep all text in language-specific layers.

You can use nested layers, e.g., have a layer named "English" and inside that a layer for English text, English extra transcript texts, English backgrounds, and so on, but the inner layer names must still also end in "English" or they won't be enabled automatically. Even though the code won't pick nested layers up for a language automatically (it just looks at layer names without regards to their nesting), the outer nested layers are helpful to quickly switch a language on or off in Inkscape.