Comic Book Archive file

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ComicBook Reader File
File name extension	`.cbr, .cbz, .cbt, .cba (containers)`
Internet media type	`application/x-cbr`
Type of format	Multimedia, archive file

Comic Book Archive file or ComicBook 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.^[1]

1 Format
2 Adoption
3 Examples
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Format

Comic Book Archive files consist of a series of image files archived in ZIP, RAR, or more rarely TAR or ACE file formats with the filename extension renamed to .cbz, .cbr, .cbt and .cba respectively. CBZ/R/T/A files typically contain PNG or JPEG files. Occasionally GIF, BMP, and TIFF are seen.

Advantages of these file formats include simplified file viewing and maintenance.

[edit] Adoption

CDisplay was the first application to support the CBR format. An open source clone, CDisplayEx, duplicates many features of the original CDisplay. Comical is a CBR reader for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Xee is a CBR viewer for Mac OS X. For users of the GNOME desktop environment, the Evince document viewer includes support for the format and KDE4 users may use Okular. Other Linux readers for the format are QComicBook and Comix. ComicRack is a comic reader and manager for Microsoft Windows.

The Comic Book Archive format is a compressed archive which uses one of several popular compression file formats. The files may be opened using the appropriate compression programme simply by changing the file extension, depending on the file format: