Iāve recently started using Kritaās Comics Project Management Tools (Comics Project Management Tools) for my university graduation project. First off, thank you for this incredibly useful plugin! Iām assuming itās maintained by the core Krita team since itās bundled with Krita itselfāplease correct me if Iām wrong and point me in the right direction!
Here are the key points I encountered:
A āClean Upā feature for physical files. I noticed that removing a page from the project list doesnāt delete the actual .kra file from my disk. These files can be very large, so a built-in way to find and remove these āorphanedā files would be incredibly helpful for project hygiene.
In-plugin notes field for pages. Currently, adding notes requires a trip to File ā Document Properties. Having a quick and dedicated field for page-specific comments right inside the CPMT docker would feel much more integrated.
Decouple the internal Page ID from a user-editable name. Currently, the automatically generated āpage nameā acts as a unique internal ID. It would be great if this technical ID could be hidden from the main UI (and perhaps restricted to ASCII for compatibility). Then, we could have a separate, freely editable field for a āPage Nameā or āDisplay Nameā that is shown to the user in the list. This would make organizing and identifying pages much more intuitive.
More direct export formats (PNG, JPG, WEBP, PSD). While the current export targets comic formats, directly exporting to common image formats and, crucially, PSD (a requirement for my school submission) would be a huge workflow booster.
Persistent UI State and Settings.
Currently, there are a couple of issues with the pluginās UI state not being remembered:
The docker panel is unusually wide when Krita starts up without any documents open.
The slider that controls the thumbnail size in the docker is reset every time Krita restarts.
It would greatly improve the user experience if the plugin could remember its interface state, including the docker width and the thumbnail preview size, across sessions.
āOpen Projectā should remember the last directory. It would save a few clicks if the āOpen Projectā dialog could start in the last folder I used, instead of resetting each time.
Option to export a structured .kra file sequence. It would be incredibly useful to have an export option that can process and output the .kra files themselves. This would generate a clean, sequentially numbered set of .kra files in the export directory, reflecting the logical page order defined in the project.
This is different from just copying files because it could leverage the pluginās knowledge of the project structure. For example, it could:
Rename files to a consistent pattern (e.g., ProjectName_001.kra, ProjectName_002.kra).
This feature would be a lifesaver for creating clean archives, preparing files for submission, or simply having a well-organized backup of the final page sequence. It bridges the gap between the pluginās logical view and the physical file system in a very practical way.
Thank you for your time and for building such a powerful tool! These are just my thoughts as a new user diving into comic creation with Krita. I hope this feedback is helpful!
Just as a side note: PSD support in Krita is very spotty and I can not recommend exporting to it ever if you can avoid it. Thereās no guarantee that Krita features are compatible to PSD. There wonāt ever be 100% compatibility to photoshop.
I know, but this is a mandatory requirement from my school. Iām only using features that Iāve confirmed Krita can correctly export to PSD for this assignment. To be honest, I really donāt understand why the school has this requirement. Managing comic projects in Photoshop (without plugins) is extremely primitive, and aside from PS, other applications have poor support for PSD files. The schoolās requirement essentially forces us into a dilemma. I just checked the documentation and found that Krita can export files from the command line. Iāve decided to manage this project manually for now and use a batch script to export the PNG and PSD files I need.
It looks like this feature request has been buried. I think these features are quite necessary. If I have to, maybe I could try to implement them myself, but Iām not very confident in my programming skills.
How should I get started? To modify just this plugin, do I need to clone the entire Krita repository?
Comic Manager is a python plugin so you can just write some modifications in python without needing to build Krita from source! On windows, pre-installed plug-ins can be found in Krita > share > krita > pykrita.
Managing comic projects in Photoshop (without plugins) is extremely primitive, and aside from PS, other applications have poor support for PSD files. The schoolās requirement essentially forces us into a dilemma.
That sounds like the subject of a treatise to write and share as an accidental activist, in regards to requirements for any project at universities. The treatise could be titled āCreating Comics with Krita versus Photoshopā or something else along that line.
Iām planning to start with the simplest parts. After reading the plugin source code, I already have some ideas.
Currently, Iām planning to make the following changes:
Right now, when we remove a page, nothing changes in the Pages folder in the file system. Iāve decided to change this: the removed .kra file will be moved to a subdirectory named _deleted.
Currently, when adding an existing page, the .kra file is moved to the Pages folder. Iāve decided to change this: if the file is added from _deleted, it will be moved; if itās added from the projectās Pages folder, no action will be taken; if itās added from any other folder, it will be copied.
Currently, after reordering pages via drag and drop, the files in the Pages directory donāt change. Iāve decided to change this: after each reordering, all files not in the _deleted directory will have their filenames normalized (project name + page number).
Add a button in the UI to quickly remove the _deleted directory.
Since my time and ability are limited, these changes might take a while. If you think my design is not good enough, feel free to discuss.
I plan to submit a PR after making these changes. What should I pay attention to?
These are great ideas! Although for (2), I feel like it makes more sense to have files always be moved instead of copied. The plugin is supposed to help you move scattered page files into one place, after all. Itās also inconsistent behavior depending on the location. Whatās the rationale of having copies?
For your original request (6), I wrote a small update to make it remember the last opened directory! Feel free to use that if it works on your machine set up. But if you plan to make larger changes to the plugin with more complex config, I donāt know if itās better to keep saving it to kritarc or write a separate config json file to the plugin directory or something (thatās what I do for my speech bubble plugin).
I do hope thereās a way to make exports be faster on the plugin (each page takes 3-4 seconds even with no cropping and small final image size). It might just be the limitation of having to open, flatten, and save the file on a python APIā¦ To the seasoned coders here, are there ways I could try to optimize the plugin speed? Or am I kinda stuck here with python?
I was just thinking about that too. I think it would be best to let users set whether the default behavior is copy or move. I also thought about adding a recent projects panel, but that might be a bit tricky to implement (since Iām not very familiar with PyQt and Kritaās API yetāIām studying them in my spare time, so even the small changes I just mentioned might take me a long time to implement). Besides that, I also feel that a cross-page feature is needed.
Thereās actually a quick way to export, though itās a bit dirty: we can unzip the .kra file (a .kra file is essentially a zip), and inside there is a PNG that contains all the layers merged together.
We can collect that image and then convert it to the desired format.
If needed, I think we could write a separate script instead of a Krita plugin, because implementing this as a plugin would indeed be too dirty.
It might be better to just set default as move, and add an option to the right click menu for copying pages/projects! Thatās one less setting config users have to setup and plugin has to remember.
Interesting, but yeah that sounds like a bash level script not python. That would also remove the ability to crop and remove labeled layers (though I donāt really use this much for webcomics).
Then I think the default behavior should be āmoveā, with an option in settings to also enable ācopyā (since some pages might be reused, like an author page or certain title pages). That way thereās a sensible default, and artists can customize it to their needs.
As for the export script, bash could work, but on Windows youād probably need PowerShell. For cross-platform compatibility, Python is probably the most convenient, and it can be paired with wxPython or tkinter to create a simple GUI for ease of use.
The cropābyāguide feature could actually be preserved as well ā you would parse the XML inside the .kra file to get the guide information. But I donāt know the internal structure of .kra files, and since I draw traditional pageābased manga, I donāt use the cropping or labeledālayer removal functions either. Maybe those arenāt very common.
Ah, I see what you mean. So itāll be like āAdd Existing Pagesā (move) vs āImport Pagesā (copy)? I still think itās better to just have them as separate UI buttons; any one artist would regularly use both of them. Since itās already in the dropdown menu adding one more entry will be trivial.
That reminds me, would it make sense for pages dialog to update automatically based on whatās present in that directory? I canāt imagine why someone would put other non-page files in that folder. Combined with the batch rename function, this would make mass movement of pages across projects way easier. I did notice that the comic managerās visible page names are actually Krita document Title and not the file name though.
Yeah I meant any command line tool, like bash and powershell. Also interesting, didnāt know kra files could be opened up like that! I see the XML tag for guides too. The image will still have to be extracted from .kra, loaded to memory and processed for crops, dpi change, etc. but weād bypass having to open Krita which may help with the speed. Maybe I can write is as āFast Exportā option or something.
Well, I think directly writing Add Page (Copy) and Add Page (Cut) is more self-descriptive and consistent, and compared to Import Page and Add Existing Page, it makes the difference between copying and moving much clearer.
Automatically updating based on the page folder might be more difficult to implement, because we canāt determine which page number the user just added (if they havenāt changed the document name). Also, this might require a background process that continuously scans, which could become laggy if there are many pages. We can test what scanning frequency would be appropriate when the time comes.
I also think we could add a āquick exportā checkbox when exporting, and explain how it works.
Yeah that sounds good too! Itās less about the names and more that I think both options should be available as an UI option, rather than it being a toggle setting.
Good point, we could set a timer so the update scan runs every n seconds, or if that is also slow, make it only run when user clicks āupdate directoryā or something like that. For file names, I was thinking just populate pages alphabetically, and then an option for user to batch rename page files based on page order.
Yeah either like that or a separate button under the current Export button, both makes sense imo.
Btw are you working on this on a public repo I can pull from? Although I canāt make promises (with limited free time) itād be nice if I can make sure whatever features I write are compatible with yours. No offense if youād rather work on your own though.
I havenāt started yet because Iām finishing up my internship tasks. I plan to fork one of Kritaās source repositories and use Gitās sparse checkout to clone only this plugin separately for modification. Iāll paste the repository link here when itās ready. For now, I only have time on weekends, and Iām taking some time to read the Scripting School website.
