How are descriptions formatted?

[BlueSpiders99]

Hello! I've just discovered this program and I'm wondering if it's the solution to my problem. I want to download and store my large favorites gallery on deviantart. Many of these pieces include both an image and a story in the description. It's clear that gallery-dl can download and store both images and descriptions, but it's less clear how it formats these downloads. Ideally I'd get a single file (pdf or similar) containing the image, the title, and the description for a single artwork; on the other end of the spectrum, if gallery-dl puts the description in a different file altogether, I'd have to put them back together manually and the tool wouldn't save me much time at all.

Is this program what I'm looking for, or not?

Apologies in advance if I need to ask more questions - I have very little technical expertise in this sort of thing.

[Hrxn]

Don't worry about asking questions, even follow-up ones..

Although I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do here..
But gallery-dl does not create PDF files for you, if that was your question?

[..] on the other end of the spectrum, if gallery-dl puts the description in a different file altogether, I'd have to put them back together manually and the tool wouldn't save me much time at all.

Well, not really. gallery-dl is for the downloading part. Once you have all sorts of required data at hand, you can easily process them en bloc, no need to do it manually for lots of artworks from DeviantArt.

[BlueSpiders99]

Thanks! What form does the download take? I have very little experience with this kind of data downloading and processing... stuff. Do I get png's and txt's, which I could then theoretically create a program to combine?

My end goal is to produce some kind of file containing both a DeviantArt image and its description, and I want to automate the production of these files as much as possible. It'd take me a while to learn how to use gallery-dl and I'm trying to get a sense of whether it's likely to be a dead end before investing that time.

[mikf]

Do I get png's and txt's, which I could then theoretically create a program to combine?

Yes, gallery-dl downloads jpg/png/etc files by default, and you can use a metadata post processor to write any metadata - including descriptions - to txt files.

So you need a config file and, since this is deviantart, your own custom client-id and client-secret values (guide) or you will get severely rate limited.

A minimal config file would look something like this:

{
    "extractor":
    {
        "deviantart":
        {
            "client-id": "123",
            "client-secret": "456",

            "metadata": true,
            "postprocessors": [
                {
                    "name": "metadata",
                    "mode": "custom",
                    "format": "{description}"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

Deviantart descriptions have HTML tags, so for example for this post, it would write the following to a file called deviantart_10073852_For the sake of a memory.jpg.txt:

...<br />
<br />
<br />
32x24 cm white drawing paper<br />
HB, 2B (mechanical) and 3B (regular)<br />
photo ref.<br />
15 hours<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>edit:</b> added watermark. see also <a href="https://shimoda7.deviantart.com/journal/9893620/">[link]</a>