RAR first.Įither way, the files open just like any old archive container and you can take the contents out, rename them, manipulate them, and even put more files in.
ZIP file and you don’t even have to rename it, while other apps require that you rename it from. Some apps, like the popular 7-Zip archive tool, recognize that a. This means that you can take a comic book file-say Amazing Super Comics #1.cbz-right click it, choose Open With, and open it with any application that handles. The files inside the archives are generally images in JPEG or PNG format and, sometimes, lesser used formats like GIF, BMP, or TIFF.īecause comic book archives are simply renamed archive file types, you can use any archive tool that can handle the underlying format to manipulate them.
How to Create or Edit CBR and CBZ FilesĪlthough CBR and CBZ are by far the most popular (which reflects the general popularity of the RAR and ZIP file formats), you’ll also, infrequently, come across the following related archive files. That simple tweak completely changed the way we read comics on our computers and devices. That way, when you double-clicked on one of the files, they would open not in the archive applications they were created in, but in the comic viewers designed to read them. Not only did the extension change make it readily apparent the file was a comic book, but it it also paved the way for comic-book centered apps like CDisplay to create file associations with the format. His program differentiated itself from the more general image viewers of the day by focusing on easily displaying comic book and manga pages cleanly and sequentially, a critical feature for reading image-driven stories.īy packaging comic books with this special extension, Ayton and everyone after him accomplished two things. The idea of using a special extension for comic books was popularized in the 1990s by David Ayton, creator of the very popular freeware application CDisplay.
That’s it, not a single secret sneaky thing going on under the hood at all: just archive files with images inside.īut why rename perfectly serviceable and decades-old file formats? RAR files with their extensions modified. It can get quite complicated, you see :-) But dithering is a nice topic to think about, it has so many applications (even if one starts learning about it with images, there's an a-ha effect when you encounter it in high-sample-rate 1-bit audio or other places).Since we’re talking about file types and not the stories contained within, here’s a spoiler alert: .CBZ and. A bit of error-based dithering would be a big improvement.įor comics, probably a few specialized dither methods would be nice to have, which handle white and black in a special way (basically restricting the dithered spectrum to a band in the middle of the grayscale spectrum). It's the large chunks of gray values the same gray value, and they create artificial borders where the next gray value (of the e-ink display) starts, when actually in the image there is a smooth color blend. Then, I never used it for more than the occasional glimpse at some figure in a scientific document. I always found non-dithered images on e-ink quite bad to look at. Dithering would allow to create a perception of finer granularity. 4bits), you end up with large continuous ranges. When you just linearly scale that to 0-15 (i.e. However, you end up with a rather high-precision grayscale value.
Yes, full refresh is probably something that would be nice for image-heavy (or rather: image-only) documents.Ĭolor to greyscale is not that bad and is mostly mathematics. Back then, the archives were mostly password protected - to keep hosting sites from peeking into their contents, I guess. Or did that change lately? My time of reading comics was pretty short and lies a few years back. We probably want to have password support, too. And, as this is as good a place to collect ideas as any other: