Answer to: How your webcomic can be Free/Libre and Open-Source?

How a webcomic can be open-source?.. This is a frequent asked question. In fact, I was receiving this type of comment almost ten time at any new episode's release in the first episodes. I'm writing today this note to reply in depht to this question because it's a serious topic and I hate when I read comments like "... yet another guy playing with the open-source trend without knowing what he does"...

A new way to 'build' comic pages

I had the idea to design a collaborative open translation system for Pepper&Carrot at episode 6. It works like that:

Sources files

- Krita KRA files store artworks with multilayers, filter layers, groups, vector layers.
- Inkscape SVG files store lightweight and scalable translations speechbubbles with advanced text editing tool
- Markdown MD files to store wiki,documentation and text All sources are available here .

Building the source :

To install all the sources, build and manage them, I developed a set of scripts. The main one is a renderfarm scripts. This tool does the DJ between KRA graphics files and Inkscape SVG translation layers to build from the sources all low-resolution JPG compressed images for the web, and high-resolution PNG lossless for the print to share on this website. They also manage to backup my work, generate Work-In-Progress (wip) images.

Why is this necessary? Because a single page can have an illimited amount of translation, and this translation needs to get an output as a low-resolution jpg, a high resolution for printing and more. If I change a single pixel in a page; all the related translations needs to update. If a translation changes, it will rebuild against the artworks.

15GB of happy sources

The project has nowaday a bit over 11 episodes, 15 Git repositories, 30 collaborators, 100 Krita artworks, 500 patrons, 4000 SVG translations files, 5000 JPG low-res built and 5000 PNG hi-res built! and many commits per week (new translations) to manage.
When all sources are installed, without backups, the project size is around 15GB, with all sources built it can grow up to 25GB. With revision system and backup ; 50GB.
That's why I have now 10GB of built picture are available on this website and I predict it will double in the next years.
Edit 2018: 40GB now, 40 languages, 25 episodes, 50 translators!