New Yorker cartoon

Type newyorker · needs the internet.

A random cartoon from The New Yorker's Daily Cartoon, with its caption, the cartoonist's name and the day it came out.

At each update the plugin downloads the Daily Cartoon feed (an RSS file: a small list of the newest cartoons, about 10, each with a title, date, cartoonist, picture and page), https://www.newyorker.com/feed/cartoons/daily-cartoon. It picks a random cartoon from the newest day_range ones, so with day_range = 1 it always shows the newest. The feed has a cartoon for most weekdays, so day_range = 5 is about the last week.

The feed doesn't have the captions, so for each new cartoon the plugin also downloads the cartoon's page on newyorker.com (about 800 kB) and reads the caption and "Cartoon by ..." from it. Some cartoons have their words inside the picture and no caption on the page: then only "Cartoon by ..." is shown, and the caption line stays empty. When the page has changed (neither can be found, or the "caption" is longer than 400 characters, so it can't be one), the cartoon's title and cartoonist from the feed are shown instead ("Monday, October 5th · Chris Gural"). When the page can't be downloaded, the title and cartoonist are shown and the page is tried again at the next update.

The picture (a JPEG file of about 400 kB) and the texts are saved in the plugin's storage folder, so each cartoon is downloaded only once. The saved files of cartoons that are no longer among the newest day_range are removed, so the folder holds at most day_range cartoons. When the disk is nearly full, new cartoons are shown without being saved.

When no new cartoon can be had (the feed or the picture can't be downloaded or read), a random saved cartoon is shown. If none is saved, the update fails, and PaperPi tries again at the next update. To leave time for this within the update's time limit (60 s unless you change it), the downloads have shorter time limits than usual: 20 s for the feed, 15 s for the picture and 10 s for the page. Pictures and pages larger than 2 MB, and pictures larger than 4000 x 4000 pixels, are refused.

Everything is downloaded only from newyorker.com and its servers (such as media.newyorker.com), over https, also after a redirect. Only JPEG and PNG pictures are used.

Layouts

Layout	Shows
comic_caption_date (default)	the cartoon, its caption on up to 3 lines, and a line with the date (left) and the cartoonist (right)
comic_caption	the cartoon, its caption and the cartoonist
comic_only	only the cartoon

The caption is in Libre Caslon Text, as in v1, the date in Anton and the cartoonist in Lato Italic. Long captions are drawn smaller; text that still doesn't fit ends with "…". The fonts are Libre Caslon Text by The Libre Caslon Text Project Authors, Anton by The Anton Project Authors and Lato by Łukasz Dziedzic, all under the SIL Open Font License (fonts/LibreCaslonText-OFL.txt, fonts/Anton-OFL.txt, fonts/Lato-OFL.txt).

Settings

Setting	Default	Meaning
day_range	5	pick a random cartoon from this many of the newest ones (1 to 20; 1: always the newest)

It suggests a refresh every hour.

In the config file (every other setting is in the settings reference):

[[plugin]]
id = "newyorker-7e1d832d"
name = "New Yorker"
type = "newyorker"
layout = "comic_caption"   # optional; without it: comic_caption_date
day_range = 1

Try it without a screen: uv run paperpi render newyorker (sample cartoon), or with a cartoon from the feed: uv run paperpi render newyorker --live.

The cartoons

The cartoons and captions belong to The New Yorker and their cartoonists (© Condé Nast). PaperPi only downloads them to show on your own screen and does not share them. The sample cartoon, sample/therapist.png, its caption and its cartoonist ("Chatwell Gilbert Pennington Thurston (C.G.P.T.)") are made up: the drawing was made for PaperPi with an AI image tool and is under PaperPi's licence. It is stored in 16 shades of gray (the most a PaperPi screen shows), which keeps the file small.

All settings

Made from the plugin's code, so always up to date.

Setting	Default	What it does
day_range	5	Pick a random cartoon from this many of the newest ones, 1 to 20 (1: always the newest)

Its suggestions for settings every plugin has (a block that sets one of them uses that value instead):

Setting	Default	What it does
refresh	3600	Seconds between updates (at least 5). Leave it out to use the plugin's suggestion
level	"rotation"	When it is shown: alert, interrupt or rotation. Leave it out to use the plugin's suggestion
layout	"comic_caption_date"	Which layout (see the plugin's page). Leave it out to use the first
storage_mb	500	Most megabytes this plugin may keep in its storage folder; over it, the files changed longest ago are removed first. Leave it out to use the plugin's suggestion
storage_days	30	Files the plugin has not changed for this many days are removed (0 = keep them). Leave it out to use the plugin's suggestion

Sample images

All sample images are in tests/images/, named newyorker-<layout>-<screen>.png, where <screen> is 9in7 (9.7", 1200x825, 16 grays), 7in5 (7.5", 800x480, black and white) or 5in65 (5.65", 600x448, 7 colours).

comic_caption_date, 9.7"	comic_caption, 9.7"	comic_only, 9.7"