ComicRack

tips & tricks

the book that will help you (mis)use ComicRack to its full potential!

ComicRack
tips & tricks
(mis)use = innovate + misuse
the book that will help you (mis)use ComicRack to its full potential!

cYo soft

1st edition

Dedicated to unfulfilled feature requests

Table of Contents
1. Why only ComicRack? ..................................................05 2. The Zero-day affair ..................................................07 3. Clean up your messes .......................................................11 4. Chronologies et al ....................................................14 5. Collect em all ....................................................18 6. Rack on a Mac ....................................................21 7. Reviews in the Rack ..................................................24

5 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

The wide variety of books you can manage with your ComicRack software

WHY ONLY COMIC RACK?

ComicRack is the best comic reader and manager. Yes, we know that you already know this. But, we ask you: Why only Comic Rack? ComicRack is also an excellent PDF and DJVU reader and manager. You can add all your PDFs to your ComicRack library, and let it do the rest! You would need to enter relevant text in the metadata fields needed to organize the books in the way you want. However, since ComicRack is built to manage comics by default, you can tweak the metadata fields to suit your needs. We would just need to make smart lists for each category of our non-comic books. In the genre metadata field, enter a keyword that would come in handy while making a smart list with the genre criterion. This could be, for example, any of these: eBook Programming Chess Next you would need a grouping field. You can (mis)use any metadata field for this, which you usually dont use for organizing your comics. These grouping fields, for example, may be: eBooks: Fiction, Non-fiction, Magazines Programming: C#, Python, .NET Chess: Openings, Middle game, Strategy, Endgames

eBookRack

From Robert Ludlam to Stephen King to Readers Digest to the Steve Jobs biography, get all your ebook PDFs in ComicRack. Once you group your ebooks, these can be further stacked upon like regular comics. So, you can even easily manage magazines that ship weekly or monthly.

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6 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

ProgrammingRack

So, you are a programmer, and love to read and learn from the plethora of informative texts. And how do you quickly find a book from the many you have? Ever wished them to be organized by the computing language groups? Or would you rather have them sorted out by the publishing category (for instance, all Head First books together)? ComicRack is the answer!

ChessRack

Chess lover? Need a way to manage your evergrowing digital collection of chess books? Just bring all your chess books in ComicRack under the chess genre. Next, you may group them, for example, by openings/ strategy/endgames. You can also simply group them by authors or publishers, as you would do for your regular comics.

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7 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

THE ZERO DAY AFFAIR

Managing zero day comics with ComicRack Whats the best way of using ComicRack for managing new comics added to your ever-expanding digital collection? Well, it is a matter of personal opinion as to how every user likes to organize his books. As a regular user of ComicRack, you would already know that the metadata fields in the Info dialog are the key to having a well-managed ComicRack library. Lets us then proceed with this knowledge and explore one of the better ways (out of so many) of managing your newly added comics, especially the zero day comics that you get every week. Priming the comics

u Scrape Me Make a smart list that picks up all the newly added books in the library. These are the books that have largely empty metadata fields, save for those that Comicrack automatically picks up from the filename (like series, year, number).

One of the easiest criterion for making a scrape me smart list is the publisher is <blank> rule. This pulls out all books with an empty publisher field.

You can add a number of excluding criteria for omitting books from this list. These could be webcomics, daily newspaper strips, previews, variant covers, non-comic books etc.

Now run the ComicVine Scraper script on all the comics pulled by the scrape me smart list. The metadata fields will now automatically get filled via the information from the comic vine website.

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8 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

v CVDB Skip There may be a number of books that the comic vine scraper will miss, due to lack of data in the comicvine website. You can easily manage these books by adding a CVDBSKIP tag to these books. This can be done automatically during scraping by holding the CTRL key when pressing the skip button on the scraper. Then make a smart list that pulls all the CVDB skip books. Unfortunately, You would have to fill in the metadata fields for these books manually. w Add Scanner Tags While the scraper fills in most of the fields, it cannot find the scanners name (for obvious reasons). you need the Scan info from filename script for that. Make a smart list titled Add scanner tags with a single criterion of scanning information is <blank> to pull all the books which need to have the scanning information filled up. Now, just run the Scan info from filename script on the books pulled by your newly made smart list! Run the Scan info from filename script on all the books pulled by this smart list. The scanner name wil get added. You can optionally (manually) add a Scanner: unknown tag to all the books missed by the script.

x CBR Finder As you already know the importance* of having CBZ files for storing the metadata information (as comicinfo.xml file), we would now like to convert all the CBR files to CBZ files. Make a smart list titled CBR Finder with a single criterion of file format contains rar to pull all the books which are CBR archives. Select all the books pulled by this smart list, and convert them to CBZ, using the Export books function from the browser right-click context menu.
* Editors note: Read the ComicRack Manual (5th edition) chapter 1 - page 6

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9 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Organizing 0-day packs

u Input the zero day week date Zero day scans are arranged according to the weeks in which they are released. This requires a folder for each month, which includes subfolders for each week. There are always some new scans which are of older books, and hence are not zero days. These get their own folder (usually prefixed: Hitlists, in the order of the day on which they were released. To get this hierarchy in our ComicRack, we will smartly (mis)use a metadata field which we do not normally use. In this example, we will choose the Owner field of the Catalog tab. Here you would have to input the week date of the zero day when you get it. This could be in many formats: 2011.12.14 0-Day Week of 2011.12.14 2011-CW-49 December 14 (this format includes CW, the Calender Week, to help us include the actual name of the month and still let the weeks arrange in alphabetical order)

A typical zero day pack structure. Folders are arranged by the weeks released. Non-zero day scans are arranged as day-wise Hitlists.

For maintaining an alphabetical order, we need to input the week dates as year-month-day. You can choose to prefix this with an informative 0-Day Week of.

Some users like to see the month name instead of the month number (e.g. December instead of 12). Calender weeks (from 1 to 52) help in maintaining the alphabetical order here. So, a sample date looks like: 2011-CW-52 December 28.

v Make zero day smart lists Make smart lists for each week as it comes, (mis)using the Owner field. A simple criterion like Book Owner Is 0-Day Week of 2011.12.14 is required. You can make as many smart lists as you wish, each smart list reflecting the packs of a week. Once your books are tagged with the week date, making these lists wont take much time. You can also copy-paste the lists in the sidebar, and them edit them to get the job done even faster.

Make a smart list with a single criteria like Book Owner Is 0-Day Week of 2011.12.14. Name the smart list to something informative, most commonly the 0-day week. You would have to make similar smart lists for all the 0-day weeks.

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10 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

w Make folders for months Make folders in the sidebar for each month. Move all the 0-day smart lists of that month into its respective folder. While making the folder, it is better to choose the option All books from every list. This means that you can simply click at the folder and get the stacked 0-day packs (just stack by the owner field we used to tag the 0 days).

x Set browser views and layout If you have followed the previous chapter, your 0-day comics already have the Scan Information field properly filled up with the scanner name. Just set the browser view of your choice, and group by Scan Information. Now, all your 0-day packs are neatly grouped by the scanner name!

0 Day Weeks

Group by Scan Information

Hitlists
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11 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

CLEAN UP YOUR MESSES

Keeping your ComicRack library well maintained Now that all your comics are scraped and the 0-day packs are in order, we can now move on to a few cleanup steps needed to fine tune the ComicRack library. The smart lists of ComicRack shall prove to be most helpful here. Please note that as you are reading the Tips & Tricks manual, we assume that you are already acquainted with the basics of making reading lists. u Count Errors The comics belonging to a particular mini-series are supposed to have an of counts field. e.g. 5 (of 5). A number of mini-series books in your library may have this counts field filled up, while others might be empty. The count errors smart list will look up your library for such books. This needs to use a single regular expression based criteria: Expression is True {Sta tsMaxCount}<>{StatsMinCount}. You would now need to manually correct the count fields in the books pulled by this list. v Series Gaps Missing issues are another source of frequent trouble for digital comic collectors. You just need the series gaps smart list to find the comics which are missing in a series run present in your library. The smart list needs to follow any of these 2 rules: Series: Start of gap is Yes and Series: End of gap is Yes. You would also need to exclude atypical books from this list, like issue #10,000. The smart list is best viewed in the browser in the details view, grouped by series. Make sure the number and the gap information fields are turned on. Now you can easily find which comics are missing, so that you may get them and fill the gaps.
The Gap Information field in the details view shows visual information about missing issues of a series. gap starts here gap both before & after this issue gap ends here

Gap Information
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12 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

w Single issues not being #1s Many-a-times, we only have a single issue of a series. Obviously, in this scenario, the series gaps smart list would not be helpful. To find such books, the easiest way is to make a smart list with 2 rules: Series:book count is 1 Number is greater 1

This would easily fetch you books which are solitary and yet are not #1s or one-shots. You can now choose to either get the rest of the books in the series or renumber the books accordingly.

x Cover Only A number of archives in your collection are just a single page variant cover CBZ files. It is always a good practice to keep them separate from the full comics, so as to avoid any confusion. To find such books, a really smart smart list is needed: File Name contains cover only / variant: This works only if you are lucky to have preserved the filename, which contains words like cover only or variant cover. File size is smaller <value>MB: Since a single page CBZ would mostly be less than 1 Mb in size, we can use this value. However, to account for ads/scanner credit pages, we can pad it safely to, say, 3 MB. Various exclusion criteria to avoid false-positives (see screenshot)

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13 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

y Duplicates We will make use of ComicRacks in-built duplicates finder plus the excellent duplicates manager script. This script basically chooses which of the duplicated comics to keep (and which to delete) based on the rules you specify. So first, you need to setup the rules for the duplicates manager script.

Locate the dmrules.dat in the script directory (On a typical Windows 7 system, this would be C:\Users\username\Appdata\ Roaming\cYo\ComicRack\Scripts\Duplicate Manager\dmrules. dat). Open this file in any text editor (like notepad).

You first need to edit the dmrules.dat file and set to true the variables MOVEFILES and REMOVEFROMLIB. The dmrules.dat accepts a list of rules in your preferred order, as shown in the example above. Details of rule making are explained in the script wiki and the ComicRack Manual (5th edition).

i From the Views menu on the browser toolbar, choose the Show duplicates option.

ii All the duplicate files in your library will now be visible in the browser (best viewed when grouped by series).

iii Now select all the books in the browser and click the duplicates manager button on the browser toolbar.

Everytime you need to wipe the duplicates from your ComicRack library, just repeat these 3 quick steps: choose the Show duplicates option, select all books and then click the duplicates manager button. Thats all you would ever need to do!

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14 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

How to use ComicRack to manage crossovers and events ComicRack can adeptly manage your comic book events/crossovers by its excellent capabilities of chronological list making. In this section, we will explore the various manners in which ComicRack handles chronological book orders. By now, you would have also known that chronological reading lists have maximum functionality in the details view, where you can sort them according to the order they are meant to be. The standard way The standard ComicRack way of making chronologies is by using the Alternate Series field. Obviously, this requires filling up of the alternate series field (comicvine scraper) and, most importantly, the alternate number field (manually). You then just need to make a smart list based on a single criterion of Alternate Series is <name>. Just sort the list by the alternate number field, and your simplest chronology is ready!

CHRONOLOGIES et al

Sort by Published

Veteran ComicRack team member Forkicks discovered this extremely simple method of sorting by the Published field for making chronological lists. This method has stood the test of time, and holds correct for almost 90% of lists (provided you are not anal regarding the exact minute-by-minute sequence of events in the series). For example, the crossovers of 2011, Flashpoint & Fear Itself, are quite nicely sorted by this method. However, sorting by Published is not of much use when the event/chronology involves a relatively small number of books published over a small period of time (1-2 months). e.g. Bruce Wayne: The road home.

The Flashpoint chronology, sorted by the Published field.

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15 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Complicated scenarios

Prefixing the alternate series field Now let us explore some complicated scenarios. Suppose you wish to make a chronological list for the Marvel cosmic universe. These books are spread over many (self-contained) mini-series, each respecting its own issue numbers. Similar scenarios can occur while making chronological lists for entire series like Hellboy or Star Wars. This poses a new level of difficulty that can not (yet) be managed by ComicRack. But, (mis)use we can! Such a problem can be easily remedied by prefixing the Alternate series field by a 2-digit number, in the reading order we desire. All the mini-series which are supposed to be present in the chronology will get their own alternate series, each having preceding 2-digit numbers like 01, 02, 03 and so on. All the alternate series can then be brought under one smart list, and then these can be grouped by alternate series. As we have already prefixed them with numerals, these will be sorted in our desired reading order.

u Prefix the Alternate Series with a number, in the order you wish to arrange the various books. e.g. Instead of inputting the Alternate series as Annihilation: Book One, write it as 01 Annihilation: Book One. Also input the Alternate Number as desired to maintain the correct order for the series. Do the same for the rest of the series in the chronology. v Make a smart list that gathers all these books
that you wish to include in the chronology. This can be done by including all the alternate series in the smart list.

w Open the smart list in the browser window by

clicking it in the sidebar. Choose the details view and group by Alternate Series. The chronology is ready to be read in the order you desired!

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16 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Using folders for grouping

There are instances where you already have a neatly-made folder that contains sub-folders with chronologically arranged comics. There is a simple way to reflect this chronology in ComicRack, and then convert the pre-made folder structure into a meaningful(?) alternate series reading order.

u Add the base folder (that contains all the sub-folders of the chronology) to the ComicRack library. v Make a smart list that gathers all these books present in the base
folder. This can be done easily by using criteria like - File Path begins with Hellboy.

w Open the smart list in the browser window by clicking it in the

sidebar. Choose the details view and group by File Path. The chronology is ready to be read in the order you desired!

Converting a folder-based chronology into an Alternate series chronology

u Select books belonging to the first folder group e.g. In our example shown alongside, this would be all the 5 books of the Hellboy - Wake the devil mini-series. v Input in the Alternate Series field:
grouping name + a number + series. e.g. For the Hellboy - Wake the devil books in the Hellboy chronology: Grouping name = Hellboy Number = 03 Series = Wake the devil

w Make a smart list that gathers all these books that you wish to include in the

chronology. This can be done easily by using criteria like - Alternate series begins with Hellboy.

x Open the smart list in the browser window by clicking it in the sidebar. Choose
the details view and group by Alternate Series. The chronology is ready to be read in the order you desired!

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17 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Alternate Number vs. Position Many users like to sort their chronologies using the Position metadata field. As compared to the Alternate number field for sorting the books, this has certain merits and demerits. Using the Position field for sorting is helpful if you want one book in more than one lists, and thus cant utilize the Alternate number field (which would obviously be different in different lists). Moreover, the position field is also helpful when you wish to export your books to share them with your friends, or just wish to backup the lists for yourself. On the other hand, using the Position field is more prone to sorting errors resulting from accidental drags and drops. Converting Alternate number to Position u Here you can see a chronological list for Seven Soldiers, with a single
criterion of Alternate Series being Seven Soldiers. Note that the position is haphazard, while the Alternate Numbers are well in place. Once you are satisfied with the order, just make a new custom list (empty), and drag all the books into it.

v The positions will automatically get in sync with the Alternate number.

This way you can be sure that the positions will always be correct. You will also save the hassle of dragging and dropping them into your desired positions (replaced by a lesser hassle of putting up Alternate numbers).

Converting Position to Alternate numbers An easy way of converting Position numbers to Alternate number is by using the in-built Autonumber wizard script. Select the desired books, and open the script. Choose the Number Alternate Series option and enter the beginning number. All the books will get their alternate number fields filled in the order of their positions.

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18 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

How to manage your bookstore wishlist and purchases If you are a regular buyer of comic books, you are quite likely to have a good amount of books on your wishlist, a number of books currently on order from online bookstores, and a handsome number of books and trades nicely stored on your bookshelves! How do you manage all this? If your answer is ComicRack, what follows in this section can help you a lot. ComicRack has an excellent cataloging system for managing and organizing fileless books. In this section, we will explore how we can (mis)use this to further our needs! What we shall need is some tweaking of the metadata fields in the Catalog tab of the Info dialog. Here is a quick look at how we plan to alter some of these:

COLLECT EM ALL

Store Price Wishlist CW Date ETA Wishlist month

Collection Status ISBN Pages Date Purchased Date Read

While we would use many fields for the purposes they are meant to be, some of them would need to be used as described below (and in the forthcoming pages): Store Price Owner: use this field as Wishlist CW Date - input a calender week styled date e.g. 2011 CW 25 June 23 Age: use this field as Purchase Month - input the month name preceded by the year e.g. 2011-06 June Book Location: use this field as ETA - input estimated time of arrival e.g. 3-5 business days ISBN Pages Date Purchased Date Read Collection Status Notes: use for inputting the book details from the bookstore webpage

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19 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Bookstore Collections The Collection Status field can be easily used to organize your purchased (and to-be purchased) books in the following categories: In Collection Wishlist On Order Out of Stock

Choose the Thumbnails view, dont group and stack by Book Collection Status. Your fileless collection is now organized by the Collection Status. You can see the total number of the books in each category below the stacks. If you have forgotten to assign some books to a particular Collection Status , you will get them stacked as Unspecified. You can clean-up your list by giving these books their collection status. Bookstore Purchases As we saw on the previous page, the Age field is (mis)used as the Purchase Month, where we input the month name preceded by the year e.g. 2011-06 June. Grouping by this Age / Purchase Month field, we can have a birds eye view of all our purchases, neatly arranged by the year & month of purchase. You can also view the exact day when you bought the book by having the Book Owner field (masquerading as the purchase date).

Choose the Details view, and group by Age. Choose the metadata fields as shown in the screenshot above. You can see at a glance all your book purchases.
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20 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Next book to buy If you are a regular buyer of comics, there are many chances that you buy them every week. These may range from recently released zero-days to old trades. Once you make up your mind as to which books you wish to buy in the coming weeks, ComicRack can easily help you view the next book in your purchase list! For our purposes, we can (mis)use the Owner field as the Wishlist CW Date. Here we will input a calender week styled date in the format of Year-Calender week-Month name-Date (e.g. 2011 CW 25 June 23). This will be the date when we would place an order for our desired book. Input Wishlist in the Collection Status field Now, to pull these books, make a smart list with a single criteria: Book collection status is wishlist. Group by Book Owner and dont stack. Your next book to buy wishlist is ready. Now you dont need to remember which book you thought about buying last week, and the coming week and the week next to that. Every week as you order the book, dont forget to change the Collection Status field from Wishlist to On Order, and when you finally get the book, to In Collection.
Using HC (hardcover) or TPB (trade paper back) as the Title looks quite nice in the Tiles view!

Book ETA This is for completionists only. While placing an order for a book, various bookstores have a different estimated time of arrival (ETA). How good it would be if we could organize our books by their ETA! We can (mis)use the Book Location field as the ETA Date. Here we will input the estimated time of arrival (e.g. 3-5 business days). This will be the date when we would place an order for our desired book. Input Wishlist in the Collection Status field Now, to pull these books, make a smart list with a single criteria: Book collection status is wishlist.

Choose the Details view, and group by Book Location. Your wishlist is now organized by the ETA. Now you can see at a glance which of your books would be delivered when. Every week as you get your books, dont forget to change the book location field to wherever your books are kept, e.g. Bookshelf.

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21 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

How to install Windows on a Mac to run ComicRack

Writer: O.Ren

RACK ON A MAC

The Mac platform has a number of good comic readers/managers, but none of them come even close to ComicRack. So, if you are a Mac user and still wish to enjoy ComicRack, heres how you can run Windows on your Mac and use ComicRack to read and organize your digital comics. What youll need

A fairly recent version of Mac OS, with around 20-25 GB of free space on the hard drive A Windows installation DVD, or an image of a Windows disk (for example, an .ISO file) A virtualization software (like VirtualBox , freely downloadable from www.virtualbox.org) Install VirtualBox

Download VirtualBox, and install it like you would do any app. Virtualbox will create a virtual disk on which it will install Windows. This virtual disk is in fact a file, that you will store on your Mac. Virtualbox will allow you to use Windows through a simple app window. 1a 1b 1c

Click on the New icon in Virtual Box window if the Installation Wizard doesnt pop-up. Pick a name for your virtual machine. Well go with Win7. Choose the version of Windows you have a DVD or image of, and want to install. Assign some of your memory (RAM) to your future Windows. Pick an amount greater than 512MB. However, keep in mind that this amount of memory you are giving Windows will be taken from your Macs memory. Normally, 1GB is enough for ComicRack and a couple of other light things to run on Windows 7 Home.

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22 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

Create Virtual Disc

2a

On the next 2 screens, leave the default setting as is. Next, pick Fixed Size for the storage details. Choose where to store your Windows virtual disk. By default, the future Windows drive is set to 20GB. On the next step, youll get a summary of your virtual disk setup. If youre happy with it, click on Create and Virtualbox will create the virtual disk file on your Mac. 2b 2c

Install Windows on the virtual disc Once Virtualbox is done creating your virtual disk, you will see it appear on the sidebar of the app. Go to the Settings menu by clicking the yellow icon in Virtualbox. Then go to the Storage option. There, you should have an empty CD/DVD line on the left side, under the IDE Controller Storage Tree. Select it, then go to the right panel and click on the little CD icon. If you have a Windows DVD, insert it in your DVD reader and select the DVD Reader in the dropdown list. If you are using a DVD image file, pick the first choice, Choose a CD/DVD disk file and select your disk image file through the Finder window that will pop-up. Once this is done, click OK to exit the Settings window. Go back to the top bar of Virtual Box, and this time, click on the green arrow to launch your Windows virtual machine. 3a 3b

The virtual machine will boot on the DVD or disk image file you assigned on the previous step. As almost all the recent Windows CDs/DVDs are bootable, so it will right away start installing Windows from the disk/image you used.

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23 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

4 Just follow Windows installation steps on the screen, and it will be installed in a few minutes, depending on the version of Windows you are using. It is possible that Virtualbox reboots your virtual machine after installing Windows. Now you have Windows running on your Mac. Setup Windows Screen 5 Windows screen is displayed in a Virtualbox window, but by default its a very small window. To be able to resize your windows screen, you have to install Virtualbox Guest Additions. Launch your Windows machine by clicking on the green arrow. Select your Windows screen, go to the Macs top menu bar, where you have the Mac apple and the VirtualBox VM menu, and pick Devices. In the drop down menu, choose Install Guest Additions. That will pop-up a window in your Windows screen asking you if you want to run VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe. Choose to run it and it will install itself. Once this is done, you will be able to resize the screen of your Windows machine to your liking. Install ComicRack Go to your Windows virtual Machines screen, download the latest version of ComicRack, and install it by double clicking on the .exe file. And thats it, youre done! You are now running ComicRack on your Mac

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24 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

REVIEWS IN THE RACK

How to use ComicRack to add reviews to your comics

This section is only for people who like to read comic book reviews. ComicRack does an excellent job at letting you input your ratings (and also viewing community ratings). After all, where do you get to input 0.1 incremental ratings! Still, some users (like your faithful editor) like to take it a step further and use it to enter their own review. Unfortunately, ComicRack does not (yet) have a dedicated metadata field for this purpose. You can always (mis)use some other field (that you do not use) for this purpose. Even a step further is adding entire review pages to the CBZ/CBR archives. The next time you re-read your comic, you wont have to search the web again for the review, as it will be available as just another comic page.

Add Review Pages to ComicRack Firstly, you need to have the webpage which has the review of your choice. Capture the page to an image file, ready to be added to the comic book archive in the ComicRack library. Open the CBZ/CBR file with any archive editor (like WinRar) of your choice. You can do this from within ComicRack using the Open with metascript. Add the saved page to the comic book archive.

u Use any image/webpage-capturing application or browser extension v Save the webpage to your
to get the webpage that has the review of your choice.

hard disc as a .JPG or .PNG file.

w Here is the Info dialog of the CBZ file to which we

would like to add our review.

x Open the CBZ file in WinRar. Use the Add button and
browse to the saved review page. Add this page to the archive.

y The review page has been now added to the

archive. Dont forget to mark the Page type as Other. This will come in handy later.

The review page shows up in ComicRack as any other page in the CBZ/CBR file being read.

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25 u ComicRack Tips & Tricks

One-line Reviews Ever feel like adding your own thoughts about a comic you just read? Well, since we do not have a metadata field for that, you can (mis)use any field that you dont use to add your review.

Here you can see the reviews that have been entered in the ISBN field of the Catalog group of metadata. The best way is to have simple one-line reviews, that can be viewed in the Details view, without the need for opening the comic book. Reviews Smart List

Now that you have added the reviews, you would surely wish to have all the reviewed books together, wont you? If you have remembered to mark the review pages as other, your job is very easy.

u Use the tags field or (mis)use any existing field to add the Reviewed tag for comic books to which you have added your one-line reviews or review pages.

v Make a new smart list with any of these criteria: User script having books with
pages marked other, or the metadata field that contains the Reviewed tag.

Now start organizing that book collection!

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Solutions?

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Specific fields for eBook management Metadata field for Week In-built duplicates manager Metadata field for Story Arc Better Catalog metadata fields ComicRack iOS App In-built zip file manager

Get all the manuals!

The ComicRack software has a manual for everyone! The Quick Introduction Manual introduces you to the ComicRack software and makes you feel comfortable using and exploring it, the official ComicRack Manual provides you with the complete know-how needed to fully understand and enjoy ComicRack, and the Tips & Tricks Manual help you tweak the program to utilize it to its full potential. All these manuals can be freely downloaded for personal use. So, be sure to read them all for the perfect ComicRack experience!

Quick Introduction Manual

For the first-time user Pages: 19 Size: 2.3 MB

The ComicRack Manual

For all users Pages: 179 Size: 37.5 MB

Tips & Tricks Manual

For the advanced user Pages: 28 Size: 7.4 MB

Please support us!

ComicRack is donation-ware. You are encouraged to donate a small amount to support this project and keep it running. ComicRack has no functional limitation whatsoever if no donation is made. Hundreds of hours of work have been put into ComicRack to make it the best, most versatile and simply the most fun to use comic book reader and manager in the world. Starting out as a small fun project, it has evolved into what you currently see, a multi-language application with its own web site and support forums. So if you think ComicRack adds value to your life, give something back.

Answers found here!

The ComicRack team sure has been busy - there is barely a feature left untouched in this monster of a software. Even the official ComicRack manual now does not have enough space to fully justify the infinite potential of this awesome software. The tips & tricks manual aims to bridge that gap.

tips & tricks

The important stuff you never knew you should have known
How to make chronologies with ComicRack How to manage zero-day comics with ComicRack How to keep your ComicRack library well maintained How to use ComicRack for managing non-comic books Why I started the ComicRack manual series

There was a time when users often complained of the lack of a manual on ComicRack. Making the ComicRack manuals was a challenge for me, a fun challenge. I knew that people learn best when information is engaging, clearly written, and visually appealing. Unfortunately, most manuals read like dry catalogs. This is why I started writing the manuals on ComicRack. With this last one, I complete my trilogy of ComicRack manuals.

600WPMPO is the author of the official ComicRack manual (now in its 5th edition) and the Quick Manual. cYoSoft 2012

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