launchbox The Ultimate Magazine Experience

Playnite_Is_Better · September 2, 2023

4 hours ago, Lucoshi said:

King Slayer I sent you more covers

Thank you Lucoshi, I'm adding them now.

SiriusVI · September 3, 2023

I have a large collection of .cbr files and for soe reason, Comic Utility Belt does not extract pages from them. It says "Export completed", but no pages are extracted. It works with .cbz and .pdf files.

Any help?

OK, nevermind, it works, but the reason why is really weird.

I copied the comic utility belt folder to my "M" drive, which is where all my Launchbox Tools are. If launched from this directory, the export does not work with .cbr files, but it does with .pdf and .cbz files. The .cbr extraction works if I just keep comic utility belt in my "C" drive in the download folder.

What is going on here?

EDIT 2:

OK. got it. There CANNOT be a space in the path to the "comicutilitybelt.exe".

That leads me to my next question. Is there any way to export just the last page for .cbr files, too?

Edited September 3, 2023 by SiriusVI

uberrr · October 2, 2023

How does one add a background and play music using Flip PDF? (I have the pro version)

Edited October 2, 2023 by uberrr

Playnite_Is_Better · October 2, 2023

8 hours ago, uberrr said:

How does one add a background and play music using Flip PDF? (I have the pro version)

FlipPDF has a options menu that can be slightly overwhelming at first. Once you get used to it you will see it's pretty easy to understand, just alot of text. The BG photo and BG music are in the settings somewhere, I'll leave my template here for you to use and look over.

my template.txt

Also, I used playlist's to autopopulate the magazine platform into individual categories. I saw you asked that last night not sure where the post went. Hope that helps ya out a bit.

Edited October 2, 2023 by KingSlayer420

uberrr · October 5, 2023

On 10/2/2023 at 7:04 AM, KingSlayer420 said:

FlipPDF has a options menu that can be slightly overwhelming at first. Once you get used to it you will see it's pretty easy to understand, just alot of text. The BG photo and BG music are in the settings somewhere, I'll leave my template here for you to use and look over.

my template.txt 4.08 kB · 5 downloads

Also, I used playlist's to autopopulate the magazine platform into individual categories. I saw you asked that last night not sure where the post went. Hope that helps ya out a bit.

Amazing, spent the last 3 days on this lmao. Not sure what to do with the template, i cant seem to plug it in anywhere and i cant change the settings in flippdf outside of format / pre-made templates. I'd love to see PC Gamer and Gameinformer make an appearence Also found an issue of game players that was listed as missing and created the metadata for it, I'll send it via PM.

Playnite_Is_Better · October 5, 2023

7 hours ago, uberrr said:

Amazing, spent the last 3 days on this lmao. Not sure what to do with the template, i cant seem to plug it in anywhere and i cant change the settings in flippdf outside of format / pre-made templates. I'd love to see PC Gamer and Gameinformer make an appearence Also found an issue of game players that was listed as missing and created the metadata for it, I'll send it via PM.

I spent a month or so doing mine lol, that template can be loaded into FlipPDF and it changes all the settings to the ones I used to make my mags. Forget where exactly, might have to open up FlipPDF later and snap some screenshots for ya if your having trouble with the settings. PC Gamer and Game Informer are the top 2 on my list of mags I want, can't find decent pdfs for those atm .

Lucoshi · October 5, 2023

On 8/19/2023 at 11:00 PM, JaysArcade said:

I've converted 550 something Mad mags to PDF from CBR so I can extract the back covers. Do you guys think there is there any real good reason to keep the CBR versions other than the compression savings? The compression doesn't really seem to have saved much space to be honest.

@Baggio, your Acrobat actions work great.
@DerSchlachter, The CBR converter was a good find. Thanks for the heads up.

I figured out how to do the ImageMagick thing and I've been creating a shitload of complete sets of logos for these humor mags. Still have a few sets I'm working on. I'll share them if anyone thinks they are of use to anyone.

I also want to help you!

uberrr · October 6, 2023

On 8/6/2023 at 12:35 PM, Baggio said:

I thought this may be helpful to help create the back images rather than have to extract all the images with ComicUtilityBelt which takes a lot of time and you then have to sort through them.

Just place these files in your folder with your PDFs and run the Batch file and it will create separate PDFs adding LASTPAGE to the file name.

Then you can open up ComicUtilityBelt and check "export cover page" and it will extract the just front page of your original PDFs and the newly made PDFs with just the back page in.

Once they are done you'll just have to go in bulk rename and remove LASTPAGE from the file name.

Extract Last Page PDF.zip 3.19 MB · 17 downloads

btw if you want to export the second to last page if you are using our out-of-print mags, change the r1 in the batch files to r2

If anyone knows of any easier way to do this let me know

Could you make a bat to extract first page from PDF also? I'm also getting low quality jpgs from ComicUtilityBelt and i cba to pay for acrobat

Baggio · October 6, 2023

14 hours ago, uberrr said:

Could you make a bat to extract first page from PDF also? I'm also getting low quality jpgs from ComicUtilityBelt and i cba to pay for acrobat

Here you go.

Extract First Page PDF.zip

Below is a work in progress but it converts the folder of PDFs into JPEGS.

For this to work Ghostscript needs to be installed https://ghostscript.com/releases/gsdnld.html

PDF to JPEG.zip

I'll try to get these into one batch file at some point.

Edited October 6, 2023 by Baggio

Cineaste · October 7, 2023

On 7/13/2023 at 4:24 AM, DerSchlachter said:

I have a lot of German Magazin and a few english Magazin Cover....and 10000+ Comic Cover...if desired, I will upload them

Hi mate, I used to subscribe to Play the Playstation and Playzone for years. Do you happen to have any media for these (clear logo, fanart, etc.)?

Edited October 7, 2023 by Cineaste

Playnite_Is_Better · October 7, 2023

13 hours ago, Cineaste said:

Hi mate, I used to subscribe to Play the Playstation and Playzone for years. Do you happen to have any media for these (clear logo, fanart, etc.)?

ello mate. I am from the USA and have never heard of those before, always like to hear about new mags that I didn't know even existed. I took a look at a few from the links you posted and they seem like they are of decent quality, good enough to make a set out of them I'm sure. I'll see what I can do about making a set for those soon as I find some extra time, been busy working on some bigbox themes lately. I will return to add to this project at some point and get things cleaned up.

Baggio · October 7, 2023

I forgot to add, for anyone that's using the PDF to JPEG batch file I posted you can edit the quality and density settings (-quality and -density) as needed to suit your requirements and to make the file size smaller. In this, it's set to the highest quality (100) and a density of 300x300 DPI.

uberrr · October 7, 2023

1 hour ago, Baggio said:

I forgot to add, for anyone that's using the PDF to JPEG batch file I posted you can edit the quality and density settings (-quality and -density) as needed to suit your requirements and to make the file size smaller. In this, it's set to the highest quality (100) and a density of 300x300 DPI.

Thanks, works like a charm

Baggio · October 8, 2023

12 hours ago, uberrr said:

Thanks, works like a charm

👍

uberrr · October 14, 2023

On 8/20/2023 at 7:21 PM, JaysArcade said:
Once you install imagemagick, you run a batch file. I run it in the folder with the seed image and then copy out the images to another folder when its done.
for /l %%x in (1, 1, 34) do (
   echo %%x
   magick convert "Mad.png" -font "Segoe-UI-Black" -pointsize 155 -fill white -strokewidth 7 -stroke black -gravity south -annotate +0+0 "XL #%%x" "Mad XL #%%x.png"
)

I tried to create a batch file with this but it didnt work, could you post it?

JaysArcade · October 14, 2023

19 hours ago, uberrr said:

I tried to create a batch file with this but it didnt work, could you post it?

Here you go.

Retro_Rage · November 3, 2023

Thanks for all the info in this thread! Just wanted to mention a small correction though, the VHS tapes and a few other things listed in the op weren't actually distributed with any of the magazines. The Game Player ones were sold in stores and most of the Nintendo ones were given away or mailed in specific instances. There are a few other ones to that you mentioned that are the same. i Just wanted to mention that as I am in the process of adding a ton of supplements as additional apps and trying to get it as close to possible as how they came in stores. Especially the ones I remember from my childhood.