ComicGrabber is a small and simple utility to automate the process of 
fetching images that are embedded in web pages.


About ComicGrabber
-------------------
ComicGrabber was written to fetch the famous Dilbert comics from their website
to archive them. While the program may be useful to fetch other images too,
no provisions for this were made and there are also no plans at this point 
to add support for other websites explicitly.
Maybe some will work with the current approach - I haven't tried.
If you develop a nifty addition to support other websites, let me know and
I will probably add it.


What it does
------------
There were two reasons for me to write ComicGrabber:
1) United Media must have decided to mangle the file names of the GIF or
   JPEG files with the comic strips. (Which is rather useless and silly
   if you ask me.) They are adding a random sequence of digits in the
   date part of the file name. So you have to edit the file name of every
   comic strip you want to save. The funny thing is that they are always
   adding it at the same point (after the "2" of 2005 on Monday, after the
   "20" of 2005 on Tuesday etc.) which makes it even more useless.
2) Laziness. :-) It's quite boring to click through the web pages and save
   the comics, no matter if you have to tweak the file name or not.


How to use it
-------------
The following text fields are prefilled with the data for the Dilbert comics.
If you change them, they are stored via the Java Preferences API when the
program exits. (In Windows, they are thus stored in the registry.)

"Main URL" 
This is the URL of the main page where the search starts. So you can see 
that ComicGrabber will only work for websites with an index page that
has links to all pages containing an image that should be downloaded. This
should be the case for most websites, though.

"Start of link URL" 
ComicGrabber must somehow be able to recognize the hyperlinks to the 
subpages that contain the images. This is done with this
prefix, i.e. all links starting with this string will be followed.

"Start of image URL" 
When it has loaded a page with an image on it, ComicGrabber must somehow 
know which images to save. They are recognized by this prefix.

"Destination folder" 
Folder on your local storage (harddisk, network, whatever)
where the images should be saved. 
To save the images, ComicGrabber uses the name of the page on which it was 
found, assuming that it has a usable name for it. While this is true for 
the Dilbert archive (and seems to be for all United Media comics), it is 
clear that a more complicated approach would most likely be needed for 
other websites.

"Fetch"
To start fetching the images, press this button. In the log window in the
lower part of the program window, you will see what ComicGrabber is doing
and if there are any problems.
Please note that it is not unusual to see the message "File already exists
or could not be created" as you will often already have some images that
are still on the website from a previous fetch. As you can see below, it
is one of my tasks to make a distinction between the two cases as the latter
one indicates a rather serious error (such as missing permissions to create
the file in the chosen destination folder or no space on the medium).

"About"
This opens a dialog window with version information etc. about the program.
In this window, you also find two buttons to display this ReadMe and the
copyright information. Well, you've probably already found the first button
unless you are reading this on my website. ;-)


To Do
-----
1) Add a file chooser to be able to choose the directory where the images
   will be saved.
2) In the log, make a distinction between "file already exists" and "file 
   could not be created".


Contact
-------
If you want to contact me, feel free to mail me at
comicgrabber@nur-weiter-so.de!


Copyright (C) 2005  Markus Bäurle
---------------------------------
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA