English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Manual downloads

gizmomelb · 31 August 2006, 02:57

Hi all,

I thought I'd jump in early (as there are only 100 manuals so far on HOL) with a request to please NOT use the PDF format to archive the manuals and suggest using the Comic Book Reader (CBR or CBZ) format instead.

PDF bad!

PDF is a proprietry format and can change at any time, which means that someone will then need to reverse engineer the new format and code a new (Amiga) viewer.

Also from what I've read (I've never used the program btw) APDF is a little bit flaky and there are incompatibilities with Windows and Mac PDF viewers. You also need a fairly beefy Amiga to run APDF.

CBR good!

The Comic Book Reader 'format' is an open format which basically is a set of sequentially numbered images (PNG, GIF or JPG) which are in either a flat folder or a .zip, .rar, .tar or .ace compressed file.

The benefit of this is that virtually every computer system can display GIF, JPEG or PNG images and there is a PKZIP archiver for almost every system too.

The Comic Book Reader is a standard graphics viewer, but what it tries to do it automatically 'move' around the image you're viewing from left to right, top to bottom. It moves each time when you press the spacebar or mouse button.

ie: if you have an image 1024x768 and you only have a 640x512 desktop, it'll show the top left of the image, click, then the top right, click, then move down and show the left hand side, click, then the bottom. So it doesn't resize or compress the image (so then you couldn't read the text), it moves the screen around the image so you can see it all (sort of like reading a comic book where you 'read' each panel).

True, a CBR viewer would have to be written for the Amiga, but there are a number of open source CBR viewers, not to mention that there are already lots of JPG & GIF viewers for the Amiga, as well as PKZIP support. There is the possibility of a CBR viewer for the Amiga even supporting down to a basic A500 with Kickstart 1.2/1.3 - so then EVERY Amiga owner can download and read the manuals.

Don't have enough memory to view the full archived .CBR file on your A500? Easy, PKUNZIP the file so you have the individually numbered and named files to floppy or HDD, then run the CBR viewer and it'll work fine.

A good freeware (Windows) CBR viewer can be found here (closed unfortunately):
http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay

More info on the CBR format, as well as links to open source viewers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDisplay

There is a free (Windows) utility to create CBR files (for the lazy) here:
http://www.techknight.com/software-comicshrink.php

Otherwise you just RAR or ZIP archive a directory of (sequentially named) image files and rename it to .CBR

So how about it? Comments and thoughts most welcome.

31 August 2006, 02:57	#1
gizmomelb Registered User Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: melbourne Age: 55 Posts: 541	Manual downloads - please don't use PDF! Hi all, I thought I'd jump in early (as there are only 100 manuals so far on HOL) with a request to please NOT use the PDF format to archive the manuals and suggest using the Comic Book Reader (CBR or CBZ) format instead. PDF bad! PDF is a proprietry format and can change at any time, which means that someone will then need to reverse engineer the new format and code a new (Amiga) viewer. Also from what I've read (I've never used the program btw) APDF is a little bit flaky and there are incompatibilities with Windows and Mac PDF viewers. You also need a fairly beefy Amiga to run APDF. CBR good! The Comic Book Reader 'format' is an open format which basically is a set of sequentially numbered images (PNG, GIF or JPG) which are in either a flat folder or a .zip, .rar, .tar or .ace compressed file. The benefit of this is that virtually every computer system can display GIF, JPEG or PNG images and there is a PKZIP archiver for almost every system too. The Comic Book Reader is a standard graphics viewer, but what it tries to do it automatically 'move' around the image you're viewing from left to right, top to bottom. It moves each time when you press the spacebar or mouse button. ie: if you have an image 1024x768 and you only have a 640x512 desktop, it'll show the top left of the image, click, then the top right, click, then move down and show the left hand side, click, then the bottom. So it doesn't resize or compress the image (so then you couldn't read the text), it moves the screen around the image so you can see it all (sort of like reading a comic book where you 'read' each panel). True, a CBR viewer would have to be written for the Amiga, but there are a number of open source CBR viewers, not to mention that there are already lots of JPG & GIF viewers for the Amiga, as well as PKZIP support. There is the possibility of a CBR viewer for the Amiga even supporting down to a basic A500 with Kickstart 1.2/1.3 - so then EVERY Amiga owner can download and read the manuals. Don't have enough memory to view the full archived .CBR file on your A500? Easy, PKUNZIP the file so you have the individually numbered and named files to floppy or HDD, then run the CBR viewer and it'll work fine. A good freeware (Windows) CBR viewer can be found here (closed unfortunately): http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay More info on the CBR format, as well as links to open source viewers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDisplay There is a free (Windows) utility to create CBR files (for the lazy) here: http://www.techknight.com/software-comicshrink.php Otherwise you just RAR or ZIP archive a directory of (sequentially named) image files and rename it to .CBR So how about it? Comments and thoughts most welcome.