A comic book archive or comic book reader file is a type of archive file for the purpose of sequential viewing of images, especially comic books. The idea was made popular by the CDisplay image viewer; since then, many viewers for different platforms have been created.
Design
Comic book archive files mainly consist of a series of image files, typically PNG (lossless compression) or JPEG (lossy compression) files, stored as a single archive file. Occasionally GIF, BMP, and TIFF files are seen. Folders may be used to group images.
The file name extension indicates the archive type used:
- .cb7 â†' 7z
- .cba â†' ACE
- .cbr â†' RAR
- .cbt â†' TAR
- .cbz â†' ZIP
Comic book archive files are not a distinct file format; only the file name extension differs from a standard file of the given archive type.
The file names inside an archive are usually numbered in ascending order according to the original page number. Including the use of preceding zeros for all positions (example: using 001 rather than 1) to force the proper display of images by viewers across all operating systems. Otherwise files can be displayed out of order (example: 1, 10-19, 100-199, 2, 20-29, 3, etc.) due to differences in how file name characters are handled by each operating system.
Comic book archive viewers typically offer various dedicated functions to read the content, like one page forward/backwards, go to first/last page, zoom or print. Some applications support additional tag information in the form of embedded XML files in the archive or use of the ZIP comment to store additional information. These files can include additional information like artists, story information, table of contents or even a separate text layer for comic book translations. Efforts, such as the Comic Metadata (CoMet) Format, have been made to define an open standard.
Adoption
Windows
- Calibre can view and convert to different formats.
- CDisplay was the first application to support the CBR format
- CDisplayEx inspired by CDisplay with additional viewing features
- Comic Seer (Desktop) is a comic book archive viewer and organizer for the desktop
- Comic Seer (App) is a comic book archive viewer, organizer, and editor for Windows 8
- Gonvisor is a comic reader simple to use with some features to improve image quality
- MComix is a fork of Comix.
- STDU Viewer
- SumatraPDF
- ComicRack
Mac
- Calibre can view and convert to different formats.
- Simple Comic, an open source comic viewer with many features including archive reading support.
iOS
- Comic Viewer, a well-known paid app that supports, .cbr, .cbz, .cbr, and .zip files.
- Comic Glass, a well-known paid comic viewer app can read these formats.
- ComicFlow is a free comic viewer app. It supports .cbr, .cbz and pdf files.
Linux
- Calibre can view and convert to different formats.
- Comic Seer (Desktop) is a comic book archive viewer and organizer for the desktop.
- Comix is a full featured comic book viewer and organizer.
- Evince document viewer, includes support for the format.
- MComix is a fork of Comix.
- Okular can view many formats, including PDF and CBR, and is included in the KDE Software Compilation.
FreeBSD
- Calibre can view and convert to different formats.
- Comix is a full featured comic book viewer and organizer.
- Evince document viewer, includes support for the format.
- MComix, a Comix fork.
- Okular can view many formats, including PDF and CBR, and is included in the KDE Software Compilation.
See also
- Comparison of image viewers
- DjVu
References
External links
- Comic book archive at DMOZ
- Comics Book Reader Library
- CBR Reader (for Windows)
