Standalone illustrations

Sometimes you do not want a comic page — you want one picture. A cover, a title card, a single large panel. That is a scene spec: one background filling the whole canvas, with actors, sprites and bubbles on top and no grid around it.

type: scene
scale: 2.4
library:    "../characters"
scenes_dir: "../scenes"
scene: {name: dvur, weather: clear}

actors:
  - {char: tom,  face: happy, arms: wave, x: 0.36, y: 0.72, scale: 0.62}
  - {char: bara, pose: sit, face: happy,  x: 0.62, y: 0.82, scale: 0.34}

bubbles:
  - {text: "Dobré ráno!", kind: speech, speaker: tom, max_chars: 14}

Render it with cmf scene, not cmf render:

cmf scene pages/morning.yaml -o morning.png

The spec above, rendered edge to edge — one canvas, no panel grid, no frame.

type: decides which command renders it

Declare type: scene on every standalone illustration. It costs one line and buys you a clear error instead of a confusing one: render refuses a scene spec and points at scene, scene refuses a page spec and points at render, and validate checks that the declared type matches the structure.

The type is inferred when you leave it out — a top-level background with no rows: is taken to be a scene — but relying on inference means a typo in rows silently changes which command your file belongs to.

type: page      # the default: rows of panels
type: scene     # one background filling the canvas

Canvas size

There is no page: here — no paper, no margins. The canvas comes from the background:

Background	Canvas
scene:	The scene's own viewBox × scale (default 4)
image:	The image's pixel dimensions × scale (default 1)

So scale is "how many output pixels per unit of the artwork". A scene drawn in a 320 × 200 viewBox at scale: 3 gives a 960 × 600 canvas.

type: scene
scene: dvur
scale: 4          # 320 × 200 viewBox -> 1280 × 800

For a raster background, scale: 1 reproduces the image at its native size — which is usually what you want, since scaling a bitmap up does not add detail.

What a scene spec accepts

Everything a panel accepts, at the top level of the file:

Key	Meaning
type	scene
scene / image	The background — one of the two is required
scale	Output pixels per artwork unit
bg	Colour behind the background (visible with fit: contain)
library, scenes_dir, pixel_dir	Asset directories
actors, pixel, bubbles	Contents, same grammar as a panel
caption	A narration band along the bottom
title	A bold title drawn over the top of the art
bubble_style, caption_style	Page-wide look

Coordinates are fractions of the canvas, exactly as they are fractions of a panel elsewhere. No outline is stroked — but the art is still clipped to a rounded rectangle with the default radius of 10 px. For square corners:

frame: {radius: 0}

The title sits on top of the picture

On a page, a title: gets its own strip above the grid. On a standalone illustration there is no strip — the title is drawn over the art near the top, at 22 px by default. Leave the sky empty, or leave the title out.

An image-backed cover

type: scene
image: "../art/cover.png"
scale: 1
library: "../characters"
bubble_style: {uppercase: true, font_size: 22}
bubbles:
  - {text: "Chapter one", at: bl}

See Raster images for how fit: and embedding work.