76 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
76 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
Comic Book Archives (CB7, CBR, CBZ)
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A Comic Book Archive is just an archive with a bunch of sequentially-named
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images in it which collate ASCIIbetically to the order in which they should be
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read. Each image corresponds to a page presented by a comic book reader and a
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Comic Book Archive represents a digital comic book.
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No guarantees can be made regarding image format, image names (though you can
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expect them to match [:digit:]*\..*; that is, a bunch of numbers followed by a
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file extension), archive attributes (compression or metadata), or what is in
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archives besides the images. In fact, when a comic book only has one image, the
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most common type of file in a comic book archive may not be an image at all.
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The extension corresponds to what type of archive is being used. I haven't seen
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an extension that hasn't fit within DOS 8.3, which makes sense as amateur
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skiddies and repackers mostly use Windows.
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<http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Archive>
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book_archive>
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Here's a table of Comic Book Archive types. I can't imagine this list is
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comprehensive but I can't find more on-line.
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____________________
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| Ext | Archive used |
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|-----|--------------|
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| CB7 | 7-Zip |
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| CBA | ACE |
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| CBR | RAR |
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| CBT | tar(1) |
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| CBZ | PKZip |
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'-----'--------------'
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I normalize the files I get to the following settings:
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ARCHIVE: PKzip. DEFLATE algorithm. No other configuration.
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CONTENTS: ONLY images. Whatever encoding in which I found them.
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Sequential naming starting from one, with leading zeroes to ensure file
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names are all the same length.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Zip>
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7-Zip is free and open source. There are a number of implementations and you
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can easily extract 7-Zip archives on all modern systems.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_(compressed_file_format)>
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ACE is a proprietary archive format owned by e-merge GmbH. Nobody uses this.
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There is a free software extractor written in Python available from
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<https://pypi.org/project/acefile> and free software Python implementations
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available for most popular systems.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR_(file_format)>
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RAR is a proprietary archive format owned by win.rar GmbH. It and CBR are both
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unfortunately pretty common because RAR is popularly considered better at
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compression than PKZip. The reference implementation has a license that is a
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little more permissive than a contract with the devil and support for later
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versions is spotty in free software. I've found it's best to bite the bullet,
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use the reference unrar(1) utility, convert my CBRs to CBZs, and hope I never
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need to use it again.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)>
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TAR (tape archive) is an archive format released in its first incarnation in
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1979. It doesn't do any compression and it's easy to extract files even by hand
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with a hex editor if you can read the binary structure (which is thoroughly
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documented). Tar extractors are ubiquitous, excellent, and built into every
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modern operating system (this notably does not include Windows because
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Microsoft sucks). Later varieties of tar (such as ustar) are standardized (in
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IEEE 1003.1-2017) and files in this format will likely be readable for a very
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long time.
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_(file_format)>
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PKZip is free, open source, and like tar's later varieties, standardized (in
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ISO/IEC 21320-1.2015). Archivers and unarchivers are ubiquitous and available
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for all modern operating systems. The format is officially called ZIP but I
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call it PKZip after its original implementation (PKZIP, by Phil Katz) and to
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differentiate it from other "zip" names such as bzip, gzip, and xzip (which are
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all compression algorithms).
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