Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

Since some of my most popular blog entries ever were on the topic of comic readers for digital comics stored in .CBZ and .CBR files, I thought I would return to the topic for an update. It has been a really long time since I wrote about it and with one exception I wouldn’t use what I talked about then, it has been completely replaced with much better programs for both Windows and the Mac.

Mac OS X

Simple Comic – This is my current go-to reader. It’s simple, it works, and I like the loupe feature where you can zoom in on details if you need to.

ComicBookLover – This is a new reader that I only discovered when I decided I should compile a new list of recommendations. It seems to have more in common with ComicRack on Windows in that both are ready to keep track of your entire collection of comics as well as do the display of comics for reading.

Windows

ComicRack – I would argue that this is still probably the best choice for Windows users. I recommended it in 2006 and it is still being actively worked on today. Lots of features and a very dedicated developer have produced a really nice piece of work.

CDisplayEx – An open source version of one of the first comic readers I used on Windows. I would generally encourage ComicRack instead, but if you’ve got your heart set on open source, this one looks OK.

… and as a bonus…

Linux

Comix – Comical was never all that good and apparently stalled back in 2006 so it’s good to see that there is a reader out there for Linux that was updated in 2009 (early in the year admittedly but then digital comics aren’t exactly changing constantly). Comix looks like it’s probably a reasonably good choice and it’s open source so there’s at least a chance that it will get updates if it needs them.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ComicRack represents a step in the right direction for reading eComics. It attempts to do more than a simple reader like CDisplay because it catalogs the comics, shows you the covers, even lets you note which ones you have and haven't read or which are favorites.

Like CDisplay it handles any CBR or CBZ file, both of which are just a collection of JPG images wrapped in a rename RAR or ZIP file. Because the author is interested in more than just displaying a single issue for you, he can think in terms of bigger picture features like allowing you to read the comics on one machine from another remotely, just like iTunes. Give it a try, it's under constant, almost daily development so improvements are coming regularly.

Posted by John Munsch at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To my way of thinking, Java is a natural for building a comic book reader. It's just viewing images and lots of people are going to want to do the same thing and use the same viewer on multiple platforms. So I started working on one a while back called FourColor. I got it to a point where you can actually read .CBZ and .CBR comic book files with it and in some ways (but only some) I like it better than CDisplay or Comical but I never released the code. I think it's definitely time to do so even if I don't do much more work on it for a while. Three other Java based readers have appeared in as many weeks and maybe someone so inspired can put bits and pieces of the four available together to come up with one really great reader.

Asparagino's Comic Viewer | java-gnome viewer for zipped comic scans is a little different because it uses GNOME for its UI. Apparently Swing wasn't good enough for something that only has a handful of controls on the screen, it was much better to pick a GUI that had limited availability.

Jomic is neat and despite the suggestion that you need Mac OS X on the front page (another person apparently missing the whole "cross platform" part of Java) I was able to run it successfully on Linux. I've not yet tried it on Windows though. It's nice that it handles two pages at once, it's not so nice that you have to do the installation by hand and that you have to install Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) just to run it.

CBViewer tries to outdo Jomic in strange requirements by requiring the not yet released Java 5 rather than the plain old mainstream Java everybody is likely to have on their machines. It supposedly works with Java 2 as well but after downloading it and trying it, it seems clear to me that you would have to recompile it to get it to work with Java 2. The provided binaries were compiled under Java 5.

I have no idea why you need either JAI or Java 5 for simply loading some JPG images and displaying them. FourColor seems to do just fine now without that. What all of these readers suffer from is a common problem that pretty much any Java program is going to face. The stupid, proprietary .RAR format has been used to compress many many comics. That's where the R comes from in .CBR files, .CBZ files use .ZIP compression. Because there is no library to handle .RAR files directly under Java, you have to have the UNRAR command installed in your path whether you run Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X for FourColor to work. How Jomic avoids the need for UNRAR on Mac OS X is something I haven't looked into yet. It's this requirement that keeps FourColor from being all it can be. Otherwise, it's simple Java Web Start installation would make it one of the simplest ways to get read a comic book file.

Anyway, since I haven't filled in anything on my project page for FourColor yet, here is a plain old .ZIP file with the source code for FourColor. Don't imagine that just because I have criticisms of the other three Java comic readers that that means I think mine is perfect. Far from it, just click the "more" link to read about what I think is wrong with FourColor and a multitude of features I think it needs to become a better reader. If you'd like to give it a quick try here is a Java Web Start link to try out the latest version.

Continue reading "Java Comic Readers Begin To Appear" »

Posted by John Munsch at 7:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

.CBR and .CBZ files are RARed and ZIPed image files (usually .JPG files) containing the pages of a comic book. In order to not have to take apart the file and look at the images with an image viewer, custom viewers have been written to make it easy to read a comic directly from the .CBZ or .CBR file. I mentioned that CDisplay is the popular program for Windows and that I had written my own reader in Java so I would have something for Linux because there wasn't anything a few months back. That has changed now though as there is apparently a new reader for Linux and Mac OS X named Comical.

I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet because on Linux you have to download the source and build it, there apparently aren't pre-built packages available for Fedora Core yet. But this might provide another source of a reader other than my quick and crude attempt to create a reader. Maybe soon I can take the time to figure out how to build it or it will go into the usual package and building cycle that so many other applications are already on that makes them an easy install using Synaptic on Fedora.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)