Comic Production Workspace On Drive

Workspace on Drive

Keeping the Platemaker workspace itself inside a synced folder.

It works

A workspace can live in the cloud. This has been tested rather than assumed: put the .platemaker.json on a synced drive, open it from there, render from there.

Nothing about it is special to Platemaker — the file sits on a drive letter like any other, and Drive syncs it like any other file.

Where to put it

Anywhere. The workspace stores full absolute paths to every input and output, so it does not need to sit above, beside or anywhere near the files it refers to.

The one placement consequence worth knowing: generated templates are written to a templates folder next to the workspace file. If you want the templates somewhere the iPad can reach, put the workspace somewhere synced.

→ Templates, Workspaces

Keeping paths valid

Because those paths are absolute, anything that changes them breaks the project at once:

• The drive letter changing — the big one. See Google Drive setup.
• Moving or renaming a folder of source images
• Opening the same workspace on a machine where the same files sit somewhere else

Any of these turns inputs to Missing. See File statuses.

Should outputs be synced?

Your call, and it depends on whether you regard rendered slices as worth archiving.

They are reproducible: given the same inputs and the same output profile, a render regenerates them exactly. Treating them as disposable is a defensible position — write them locally, upload them, delete them. That is what the author does.

If you would rather keep them, nothing stops you putting the output directory on Drive too.

Working from more than one machine

The typical split is one machine per job — drawing on the iPad, rendering on the PC — and in that arrangement nothing contends, because only one of them ever touches the workspace.

If you do open the same synced workspace from two computers, Platemaker now tells you rather than letting Drive silently fork it: the second one to open sees "Open on <host> since <time>", with the option to take over if the first computer is actually off or has crashed. Taking over stops the first computer's Platemaker from saving the moment it next tries, and it is told so. The usual advice still holds — work on one at a time — this just makes it hard to do otherwise by accident.

A conflict copy (Drive's own Chapter_002 (1).platemaker.json, made when both computers manage to write at once) is caught the same way opening the folder is checked at all: Platemaker refuses to open a folder holding more than one workspace file, lists them with their last-saved time, and asks which one to keep. Choosing sends the other to the Recycle Bin.

Sync completeness

No sync-conflict problem has actually been hit in practice, so this is a precaution rather than a war story.

Before rendering, make sure Drive has finished — that the pages exported from the iPad have fully arrived, not just appeared. A file that is still transferring is a file Platemaker may read incomplete. If a chapter renders oddly, check sync state first, then press Refresh files.

→ Projects

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See also: Google Drive setup · Workspaces · Troubleshooting