902 Reading comics on PB902

[vvdb]

I did some testing using scanned images of a comic book, and was pleased with how they looked on a 902. They're black and white for sure, but there are sufficient gray tones to make the reading a pleasant experience.
The next step is to turn all these images in to a pageable format. Unfortunately, the PB902 doesn't support the standard .CBZ/.CBR formats. Since they are nothing more than glorified .ZIP/.RAR files, I think it would not be impossible to add support for them.
Is there an SDK somewhere, so that we can code it ourselves, or will this eventually be added to the 902?

Currently, a workaround is to create a PDF file containing all your images: this way you can paginate them.

[Dulin's Books]

what about just putting the batch of images in a folder and use the image viewer to run through in a "slide show"

[Logseman]

Calibre allows you to automate the transformation of CBZ files into PDF. Believe me, that's a great feature, and a well done. It's true that the files are bigger than if the images were in, say, ePub, but you can zoom them when necessary, which is sometimes useful when facing small letters or detailed action.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by Logseman

Calibre allows you to automate the transformation of CBZ files into PDF. Believe me, that's a great feature, and a well done. It's true that the files are bigger than if the images were in, say, ePub, but you can zoom them when necessary, which is sometimes useful when facing small letters or detailed action.

Is there a wish for support of cbz/cbr files. Would be nice, methinks. I'm gonna ask if that's possible.

[Logseman]

I have stated such a wish in prior occasions: big screens of 9 inches are destined for PDF, but for comics as well, particularly manga. Given that we have quite a comic-reading community around, it would be a good enhancement.

[dpayment]

Does anyone know if the Comical comic book reader will run on the 902? It's a python version written for Linux, Windows and Mac, so I'm kinda hoping that it'll work.

Link: http://comical.sourceforge.net/

Thanks in advance,
Dan

Originally Posted by vvdb

I did some testing using scanned images of a comic book, and was pleased with how they looked on a 902. They're black and white for sure, but there are sufficient gray tones to make the reading a pleasant experience.
The next step is to turn all these images in to a pageable format. Unfortunately, the PB902 doesn't support the standard .CBZ/.CBR formats. Since they are nothing more than glorified .ZIP/.RAR files, I think it would not be impossible to add support for them.
Is there an SDK somewhere, so that we can code it ourselves, or will this eventually be added to the 902?

Currently, a workaround is to create a PDF file containing all your images: this way you can paginate them.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by dpayment

Does anyone know if the Comical comic book reader will run on the 902? It's a python version written for Linux, Windows and Mac, so I'm kinda hoping that it'll work.

Link: http://comical.sourceforge.net/

Thanks in advance,
Dan

Better use the existing picviewer and decompress comic in a folder.

[igormorgado]

Damn.. and I just write a code to convert CBR/CBZ/ZIP/RAR comics to PDF

I can even batch mode on them with:

ls | while read comic; do cb2pdf "$comic"; done

here goes the code

#!/bin/bash

FILE="$@"
DEBUG="TRUE"
#DRY="echo"
TMPDIR=".tmp$RANDOM$RANDOM"
# Unconment to transform to PB
#PB902="yes"

function detect_source() {
	SOURCE="$@"
	
	if [ -d "$SOURCE" ]; then
		SOURCETYPE="dir"
	else
		EXTENSION="$( echo ${SOURCE##*.} | tr [:upper:] [:lower:] )"
		[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Extension --$EXTENSION--"
		case $EXTENSION in
			cbr|rar) SOURCETYPE="rar" ;;
			cbz|zip) SOURCETYPE="zip" ;;
		esac
	fi
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo Source detected "$SOURCETYPE"
}

function create_tmpdir() {

	mkdir -p $TMPDIR

}
function extract_rar() {
	RARFILE="$@"
	cd "$TMPDIR"
$DRY	unrar e ../"${RARFILE}"
}

function extract_zip() {
	ZIPFILE="$@"
	cd "$TMPDIR"
$DRY	unzip -j ../"${ZIPFILE}"
}

function mirror_dir() {
	ZIPFILE="$@"
	cp -rav "$FILE"* "$TMPDIR" 
	cd "$TMPDIR"
}


function convert_dir_to_tiff() {
	SOURCEDIR="$@"
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Converting dir ${SOURCEDIR}"
	for IMAGE in *; do
		IMGEXT="${IMAGE##*.}"
		if [ "$IMGEXT" != "jpg" -a "$IMGEXT" != "jpeg" -a "$IMGEXT" != "png" -a "$IMGEXT" != "tiff" -a "$IMGEXT" != "tif" ]; then
			[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "... $IMAGE not a image file. Skipping..."
			continue
		fi

		[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "... $IMAGE"
		$DRY convert "$IMAGE" "${IMAGE%.*}.tiff"
	done
}

convert_dir_to_pb902() {
	# Convert to right size and colorspace
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Converting to PocketBook Pro 902 "
	for IMAGE in *.tiff; do
		[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "... $IMAGE"
		$DRY convert -colorspace Gray "$IMAGE"  "gray-${IMAGE%.*}"
		$DRY convert -colors 16 "gray-${IMAGE%.*}" "gr16-${IMAGE%.*}"
		rm "gray-${IMAGE%.*}"
		mv "gr16-${IMAGE%.*}" "$IMAGE"
	done
}

function create_mtiff_from_dir() {
	SOURCEDIR="$@"
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Creating MTIFF from ${SOURCEDIR}"
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo tiffcp *.tiff MULTI.tiff
	$DRY tiffcp *.tiff MULTI.tiff
}

function convert_mtiff_to_pdf() {
	SOURCEDIR="$@"
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Converting MTIFF to PDF on ${SOURCEDIR}"
	DESTINATIONFILE="${FILE%.*}.pdf"
	convert MULTI.tiff ../"$DESTINATIONFILE" 
}

function cleanup_tmp() {
	[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Cleaninup $TMPDIR"
$DRY	cd -
$DRY	rm -rf $TMPDIR
}

function show_files() {
	ls -lh "${FILE%.*}"*
}

function ajuda() {
cat << EOF
Under GNU/GPL v2 or grater. Distributed AS IS.

Usage: $0 [SOURCE]

Where source can be a dir containing images, a CBR or CBZ file.
EOF
exit 0
}

[ "$#" -ne 1 ] && ajuda

detect_source "$FILE"
create_tmpdir "$TMPDIR"

case $SOURCETYPE in
rar)
	extract_rar "$FILE"
	;;
zip)
	extract_zip "$FILE"
	;;
dir)
	mirror_dir "$FILE"
	;;
*)
	echo "Cannot detect source type. Leaving..."
	exit 0
	;;
esac

convert_dir_to_tiff "$FILE"
[ -n "$PB902" ] && convert_dir_to_pb902 "$FILE"
create_mtiff_from_dir "$FILE"
convert_mtiff_to_pdf "$FILE"
cleanup_tmp
show_files

[pini]

Alas,

no luck here!
Last week I've been trying to get some comics on my PB903 and using testing Calibre for conversions. Too many options and I'm not satisfied yet. I'll explain what I want and what I tried and what (doesn't) work. (ANd more testing to do!)

Please, prove me wrong!

The input
I have a few Gigs of high-quality (I think, I'm not a connaisseur, something like 2500x1500, full colour) comics series. I used Calibre to convert them to pdf and epub, playing around with settings like colour-depth, b/w settings and resolution, but I'm not satisfied with the results. AND: Calibre is slow in these conversions of ~40MB files (up to minutes for 1 book!)
[I do like Calibre though!]

There isn't a cbr/cbz reader for the pocketbook.
One can copy a CBR/CBZ archive to the PB by tricking calibre or just using a filebrowser. I tried fooling the PB telling it to open CBR/CBZ with CoolReader, but It can't. should I try any other reader (FB, PDF?). The rationale to try this, is that a CBR/CBZ archive is just an archive like EPUB.

I am Lazy,
so I want to do any copying or conversions using Calibre.

Just use the picture-viewer
This is actually a great option!; just unzip or unrar your archive and hard-copy the directory to the PB. No tricks needed to open the files; images are scaled properly automatically and so far the quality is the best I've seen. full colour and colour depth reduction (16 shades of Gray for PB) are no problem. most strips look beautiful and have great contrast. Paging is fast.
Danger
IF the images inside the archive are NOT numbered alphabetically or in such a way the image viewer reads them in the proper order, you're lost
So why not use this option? well, I'm lazy and don't want to do the unzipping and copying manually, though you could probably write a VERY simple plugin for Calibre to do this for you.
HINTHINTHINT !!! Who can do this?!

A good thing (involving even more steps, unless a plugin would take over) is that you can convert the CBZ/CBR to epub, do image resampling (lower resolution, use sharperning, reduce colour depth to reduce file size) and THEN copy the individual image-files in one directory to your PB. would this also save the file-pagenumbering problem??? I feel no need to do this with 8 GB on an SD card, but this way I discovered that these files are fine and that rendering of the epubs by the PB readers actually sucks.

Oh, and your PB can't remember your last page in the image directory. some kind of index file might do the trick, but then we'd be reinventing .CBR or epub I guess.

Calibre is SLOW I've tried quite some conversion options, but must admit I only did this on a handful of comics, so no guarantee it works for other books! But I can guarantee you it is SLOW!
* sharpening
* colour depth 16/256
* keep ratio
* turn comics conversion OFF
* keep colour
More inportantly, I tried some different 'target e-readers' (PB is not there), to get all kinds of resolutions. Irex1000 worked best for me until now as it creates files of around 1150x900.

This is important, because one of the things I am dissatisfied with, is that most epubs didn't use the full screen. This partly has to do with the ratio of the pages of course.
I haven't tried all combi's (too slow), but resolution is important (obviously), the other options seem to matter a lot less, but can reduce files size considerably.

Bigger problem is that the result on screen is UGLY. I tried CoolReader, FBreader. They don't use the page well, don't even center the page. very ugly rendering, lots of moiree etc. Best options seemed to be actually ADOBEreader (on epubs!), but is zoomes-in a bit too far, loosing some of the borders of the actual image. I can NOT zoom like you can with a pdf file. Rendering is best after the picture-viewer, really nice to see!

Just convert to PDF
Using Calibre again, this works fine. Again, you can change the image resolution, but the default are not appropriate for your large screen, so choose a bigger target reader or disable all comics-specific conversions.
Apart form slow Calibre, I wasn'nt very satisfied with the reading quality in pdfreader or Adobe. But it is workable.

ANy surprises here?

some conclusions:
It must be possible to have a real nice rendering and thus Good and pleasant reading experience on the large PB screen, from experience with the picture viewer
Calibre is useful for conversion and automation, but needs a proper plugin for ideal settings and PB resolution and MAYBE all the magic is in the epub html or css files and these can be tweaked to actually show the images properly!

use the idea's that you like and please let me know If you find a(nother/better) solution, program, plugin?

cheers,

pini

[Lester Burnham]

Originally Posted by pini

Alas,
More inportantly, I tried some different 'target e-readers' (PB is not there), to get all kinds of resolutions. Irex1000 worked best for me until now as it creates files of around 1150x900.
pini

How was using the output profile for the Kindle DX, since PB pro 902/903 and DX are both 1200x825?

My PB 902 should be delivered today and I've been messing with Calibre for a few days getting different formats/conversions ready for some trial and error and I've been using the DX output profile for everything.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by Lester Burnham

How was using the output profile for the Kindle DX, since PB pro 902/903 and DX are both 1200x825?

My PB 902 should be delivered today and I've been messing with Calibre for a few days getting different formats/conversions ready for some trial and error and I've been using the DX output profile for everything.

When I fooled around with this 6 months or so ago, I couldn't get Calibre to keep the images at the original size. Maybe it's different today, and you should try to find out. If you create an epub or pdf file, you should be able to extract the images from it and see for yourself what resolution they are.

I ended up writing a script to bundle a bunch of images into a PDF file. It would convert the images to TIFF using ImageMagick's convert program, bundle those together into a PDF using libtiff's tiffcp and tiff2pdf programs, and then use ghostscript to add some tags (although, in retrospect, I see that tiff2pdf can add author and title tags). I've attached the Unix shell script here in case anyone's interested in it.

[Lester Burnham]

Wow!!! Is all I can say. This ereader is amazing. Comics look fantastic. I honestly didn't expect it to look as good as it does. Just used the DX output, converted to PDF and loaded it up.




All of my other hobbies are going to suffer for a few months. haha!