Comic book archive

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Comic book archive file
Filename extension .cbr, .cbz, .cbt, .cba, .cb7 (containers)
Internet media type application/x-cbr
Type of format Multimedia, archive file
Container for Images
Standard(s) None

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 → 7z
  • .cba → ACE
  • .cbr → RAR[1]
  • .cbt → TAR
  • .cbz → ZIP[2]

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.[3][4] These files can include additional information like artists, story information, table of contents or even a separate text layer for comic book translations.

Adoption

FreeBSD

Linux

  • Calibre, can view and convert to different formats.
  • Comic Seer is a comic book archive viewer and organizer.
  • Comix is a full featured comic book viewer and organizer.
  • Evince document viewer, includes support for the format.
  • MComix is a fork of Comix.[5]
  • Okular can view many formats, including PDF and CBR, and is included in the KDE Software Compilation.

Mac

  • Calibre, can view and convert to different format.
  • Simple Comic, an open source comic viewer with many features including archive reading support.

Windows

See also

References

  1. ↑ "CBR file extension". Retrieved 15 June 2011. 
  2. ↑ "CBZ file extension". Retrieved 15 June 2011. 
  3. ↑ "Metadata for Digital Comics". 
  4. ↑ "Advanced Comic Book Format project page". 
  5. ↑ "MComics Project Page". 
  6. ↑ "MComics Project Page". 

External links

Formats
XML-based
Other
Reading
Software
Editing
Sources
Free
Paid
Related
topics
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.