This chapter describes how to adjust a few things not accessible from the graphical user interface. For most people, there is no real need to touch any of these.
Many of Jomic's settings can changed by a menu item or check box in a dialog, but there
are some for which there is no user interface item. To change these, you have to manually modify
a file called jomic.properties. Keep in mind that you
can really screw things up when tinkering around here. In case you render Jomic unable to launch
without error message, remember that you can reset it by removing
jomic.properties. If Jomic can not find this file, it uses internal defaults
for all settings that are known to work. After exiting the application, a new jomic.properties
can be found with the default values stored in it.
The actual location of this file depends on your
platform and user name as shown in Table 3.2, “Location of jomic.properties
”.
Table 3.2. Location of jomic.properties
| Platform | General location | Example location with user name "me" |
|---|---|---|
| Mac OS X | ~/Library/Preferences/jomic.properties | /Users/me/Library/Preferences/jomic.properties |
| Unix-like, Web Start | ~/.jomic/jomic.properties | /homes/me/.jomic/jomic.properties |
| Windows | %APPDATA%/jomic.properties | C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\jomic.properties |
Example 3.1, “Sample jomic.properties
” shows the first few lines of such a file.
Example 3.1. Sample jomic.properties
#Settings for Jomic #Mon Jul 09 19:20:05 CEST 2007 scaleMode=fit showThumbs=false lastExportedImageDir=/Users/me/Desktop window.comic=[0, 22, 1305, 1178] showToolbar=false fillColor=\#ededed ...
The first two lines are comments generated when Jomic saves the settings on application exit. There is no point in modifying these lines because they are discarded during application startup.
The other lines however specify a setting and its value apparently using the pattern
setting=value. Table 3.3, “Possibly useful settings in jomic.properties
” describes some
of the properties that have no equivalent in the graphical user interface. Note that the value
uses Java escape sequences, which means some special characters have to be "escaped" using
a backslash (\). In particular:
Use \\ to get a single backslash. This is especially important when spefifying Windows
folders. For example, C:\Stuff\SomeFolder has to be specified as
C:\\Stuff\\SomeFolder.
Common characters that need a backslash in front: quote (type
\") and hash (type \#).
Non-ASCII characters such as Umlauts and Kanji need to be unicode-escaped. This is somewhat unfunny for non-geeks, so better avoid it or get used to typing stuff like \U009f to get an Umlaut-U.
Table 3.3. Possibly useful settings in jomic.properties
| Purpose | Property name | Description of value | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Set the folder where the cache is located. This is particular useful if you have a seperate (usually older) hard drive for you caches and temporary data. | cacheDir | The folder where the cache (and its sub folders) are located. If the folder does not exist yet, Jomic attempts to create it. |
|
| Set the maximum size of the disk cache. . If the current comic is bigger than this value, the maximum size might be exeeded temporarily. | archiveCacheSizeInMb | The maximum size of the cache in Megabyte. |
|
| Set location and size of windows and dialog. Normally there is no need to edit these manually because Jomic remembers windows and dialogs on application exit. However, in case on of the windows ends up in an invisible location, you can fix this by removing or changing its corresponding property. | window.* | [x, y, width, hight] | [32, 32, 800, 480] |
Jomic logs all actions it performs. This log can be viewed using /Application/Utilities/Console.
This log can be helpful to trace back problems. Furthermore its useful to include relevant parts of the whole log in bugs reports. By default, the log only contains basic information about initialization and user interaction. For most practical purpose, this is all you need to know about it.
If you are familiar with log4j, you can also mess around with it by providing
~/Library/Preferences/jomic-logging.properties. For example, it might
contain the following lines:
Example 3.2. Sample jomic-logging.properties
log4j.rootLogger=DEBUG, stdout log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender log4j.logger.net.sf.jomic.tools=INFO
For details on log4j, see http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/index.html.