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Advanced Comic Book Format

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tilliban:
Apart from the mind-blowing techno-banter (and that I fell from my chair laughing after having read Jim’s reply), it sounds like a truly fantastic and worthwhile project.

But I concur that it would be next to impossible to overcome the existing formats and viewers. And no one would spend that much time converting things.

Just a thought what would be fantastic for me – and all those historians who have to permanently jump to and fro between DCM and GCD to check things.
If GCD (www.comics.org) could include a viewer, so that you have all the data AND all the comic book pages COMBINED on your screen. You'd just click on a certain story, and a new window would open with the pages of that story.
This would truly be historian’s heaven!

Whale:
@tilliban:
Converting CBR/CBZ to ACBF is not a problem. It is possible to do it automatically with a simple script as CBR/CBZ archive contains just images.
But filling in the meta-data, frames definition, text-layer definition etc. would indeed require additional human effort. I believe that it is worth the effort and some time in the future library of comic books can be built out of comic books in ACBF format. Even if people will use some other comic book format in the future, comic books created in ACBF will be easily convertable to that new format as ACBF is based on XML standard and specifications are free. Even databases like GCD can extract meta-data information from it, if someone creates a script/interface for it.

Cheers,
Robert

narfstar:
Full page comics look great on my ipad. I prefer the panels on my computer.

bchat:
Just my opinion, so feel free to ignore it all you want.

More than a few CBR/CBZ files already include text files that list the publisher, date, etc, and CDisplay lets me set the Height of the page to whatever I want (although I usually just "set to width" to read small print or "set to height" to see the full page).  I'm not sure I see the benefit of downloading five programs, with features I don't really find all that important, just to read a comic book.  For me, "good enough" is good enough.

John C:
Robert, I didn't mean to sound discouraging.  That was literally just a dump of things that occurred to me when I was kicking around a similar product.  More solidarity than anything else.

I do think it's an uphill battle to get traction (there's still a ton of COBOL code, nobody really moved to XHTML, and generally advanced standards get ignored for "good enough") and I certainly wouldn't be up to it.  It's not so much whether it would be worth doing so much as it would be to convert and upload the thousands of books here, let alone the thousands out there that aren't public domain (ahem--or so I've heard).

MIME-ing the images could work.  Seems like it might bloat things a bit, but there are compressed file systems and servers can do compression, so that might not be relevant anymore.

Bchat, think of it more as proof of concept or demonstration.  The other pieces are basically Linux's complete environment.  Once the standard is finalized and if people start producing comics in the format, it'll be easy (relatively speaking) to take the existing implementation and write one native for Windows, Mac, phones, or whatever.  But until that traction happens, I can say from experience that it's not worth having polished versions for everybody--you just end up rewriting your rewrites and creating a ton of bugs...

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