Ryan,

Congratulations on launching Ohnorobot.com! Very cool. I appreciate the whole semanticness of it all. I hope you get a lot of participation from other webcomic artists. Hell, if it really takes off, you could get bought by Google and retire before you’re 30!

I actually had a similar idea, except it approached the problem from the opposite angle. Rather than pulling the text OUT of the comic and putting it into a transcript (thus duplicating the data), wouldn’t it be cool if you could write the dialogue as plain text and then generate comic-looking text using a technique like sIFR and put it INTO the comic? That would be pretty tricky, though, and require a lot of technical know-how to ensure precise positioning. It would also destroy the “lettering as art” aspect of many authors’ work. But it would make all comic text searchable/indexable, and — even better — machine translateable! That would be sweet! Imagine all of Dinosaur Comics translated by Babelfish into Arabic or something! That would be some great dinocentric hilarity for some hitherto dinosaur-deprived Arabs.

But alas, I am a man of many ideas and not enough ability. Glad to see you made your idea happen.

Carry on, good man.

-John