Dosage

Dosage is a powerful webcomic downloader and archiver.

Introduction

Dosage is designed to keep a local copy of specific webcomics and other picture-based content such as Picture of the Day sites. With the dosage commandline script you can get the latest strip of webcomic, or catch-up to the last strip downloaded, or download a strip for a particular date/index (except if the webcomic's site layout makes this impossible).

Notice

This software is in no way intended to publically "broadcast" comic strips, it is purely for personal use. Please be aware that by making downloaded strips publically available (without the explicit permission of the author) you may be infringing upon various copyrights.

Usage

List available comics (over 4400 at the moment):

$ dosage -l

Get the latest comic of for example CalvinAndHobbes and save it in the "Comics" directory:

$ dosage CalvinAndHobbes

If you already have downloaded several comics and want to get the latest strip of all of them:

$ dosage @

For advanced options and features execute dosage -h or look at the dosage manual page.

Offensive comics

There are some comics supported by Dosage that may be offensive to readers or to others that have access to the downloaded images. SexyLosers is one module that has been discussed. Dosage offers a mechanism to disable such modules. Modules listed in "/etc/dosage/disabled" and "~/.dosage/disabled" will be disabled. These files should contain only one module name per line. Note: Under Windows "~" will also expand to the user's home directory, usually "C:\Documents and Settings\UserName".

Dependencies

Dosage is requires Python version 2.5 or higher, which can be downloaded from http://www.python.org. No external Python modules are required - only the Python Standard Library that gets installed with Python.

Installation

You can invoke Dosage directly from the source code as "./dosage". Alternatively, you can install Dosage using python distutils by invoking setup.py in the root of the distribution. For example:

python setup.py install

or if you do not have root permissions:

python setup.py install --home=$HOME

Technical Description

Dosage is written entirely in Python and relies on regular expressions to do most of the grunt work.

For each webcomic Dosage has a plugin module, found in the "plugins" subdirectory of the dosagelib directory. Each module is a subclass of the _BasicComic class and specifies where to download its comic images. Some comic syndicates (ucomics for example) have a standard layout for all comics. For such cases there are general base classes derived from _BasicComic which help define the plugins for all comics of this syndicate.

Extending Dosage

In order to add a new webcoming, a new module class has to be created in one of the *.py files in the dosagelib/plugins subdirectory. Look at the existing module classes for examples.

Reporting Bugs

You can report bugs, patches or requests at the Github issue tracker at https://github.com/wummel/dosage/issues

Dosage currently supports a large number of comics and that number grows on a regular basis. If you feel that there are comics that Dosage does not currently support but should support, please feel free to request them.