rosgrai scorpio nestor
Marie Ota
Webcomic Reader is a browser extension designed to enhance your webcomic reading experience. Navigate your webcomics with arrow keys, track your progress automatically and have it sync to your Chrome Account! All while the next comic image is being pre-loaded in the background for faster reading.
My favorite comic readers are Simple Comic on OS X and Perfect Viewer on Android. However, last month I found myself in front of a big, beautiful iMac screen, a comic I wanted to read on the desktop, and no way to view it. I couldn't run native applications, and Java wasn't installed, so I turned to the web. I fought my way past the registration and uploader on All Comics only to be disappointed by:
Once I had the code running locally, I upgraded the versions of Bootstrap and jQuery, moved the title to a navbar, and switched to a dark theme. I cleaned up the copy and made small changes to familiarize myself with the source code. Once I began to understand the control flow, I was able to move the controls to the navbar to be cleaner and more compact.
Once I had the code updated, cleaned, and understood, adding features was quick and easy:
- Fit to width and fit to height were implemented by css, and buttons were added to change the class name in jQuery.
- Keyboard controls were added using jquery.hotkeys, maintained by jQuery author John Resig.
- Two page spread took longer, as it required a rewrite of the comic page display code.
I hope somebody finds this project useful, reads a few comics, or even adds a feature. However, even if nobody ever sees this page, I've built a great comic experience for myself. Next time I'm in front of a big pretty iMac and can't install any software, my friendly neighborhood web-slinger will be there to save the day.
Light, Efficient CBR Reader. It is the most popular comic book reader. It is able to read all comic book formats(.cbr file, .cbz, .pdf, etc..) and Manga. Everything is designed to give you the best reading experience, it load comic booksimmediately, reading is fluid and comfortable.
Nearly six years ago I created a demo of a web-based comic book reader. For those of you who aren't comic book readers, you may not be aware that there are a few standard file formats for digital comics. Way back in 2012 I built a JavaScript-based parser to work with those formats, well one of them, and it actually worked well:
Comic books are typically stored in two file formats - CBR and CBZ. CBRs are simply RAR files and CBZs are zips. CBR seems to be much more common, but at the time I wrote the demo I was unable to find any JavaScript library that handled them.
Another thing I did back then was use the FileSystem API to handle storing images. This was only supported by Chrome and is now deprecated. If you want to store binary data, you should make use of IndexedDB which now supports binary data well.
I decided to take a look into how I could update this code and was surprised to find an excellent library that handles both zips and rars. Heck, it even handles tar files. uncompress.js worked well for my demo despite a lack of documentation. The author does provide multiple examples though. By piecing together various examples and just generally messing around, I got the new version working.
The really crucial part is archiveOpenFile. That handles recognizing the type and figuring out the details. You get an archive object that contains data about all the entries. I filter that to files and then create image URLs for all the images.
I first encountered vertical scroll webcomics while teaching English in South Korea. My fourth grade students, especially, loved vertical scroll comics. When they found out that I love comics, too, they spent a bunch of pre- and post-class time showing me their favorite vertical scroll comics, and watching my reaction as I read them.
hello everyone! it's my first time asking for help in a forum omg. anyway. I am making a comic and I want to publish it here instead of other sites and I have zero programming knowledge and I wanted to make a reader tool for my comic so i can update it regularly.
Anyway, hechelion's answer is the simplest. Go with it if you have the pdf created. The thing with comics is that a lot of the industry ones are published as pdfs, so there's no real usage for an HTML-conversion or separate player to go with them, when most of the providers would rather go "hey, the buyer has something they like for pdfs, let's let them use that." That's not withstanding specialized readers like Amazon or Hoopla that can zoom in on specific panels, but honestly if you're not looking into programming then that might be too much of a pain unless you want to meticulously comb through each page and define the panel size/location in some reference document, and even then that's too much effort for one comic.
No experience? No problem. Every page in Temmie's comic is using a very basic template. Each page has a centered image element for the comic page, a back/forward button with href set to the next page number (except page1.html, which links index.html for the title page), and a primitive ToC below. You know the basics of making a web page that can display an image and use an image for a link? You have the means to replicate that functionality, just copypaste it several dozen times and change each one to host a different page as well as link the previous/next.
The other one by Cecilbrews is a little more advanced, but that's mostly because it has a lot more of its navigation elements in a dropdown. At its core, it's basically the same thing, just not caring to break up each web page by image and instead by episode:
Inspect is your friend for figuring out how to work specific elements. Just take it element-by-element for learning; the iframe and associated document involve nesting html within html, so anything above that is just itch's page rather than the comic.
The biggest pain is going to be managing your image sizes, since you need to account for all readers. You're going to be dealing with desktop users besides mobile. So, if your panels/pages are smaller than a player, you might need to implement some size limitations (such as what Temmie's pages do). For this example, I just left it at an un-filtered size and made the test image so big that it doesn't matter.
OK, let's talk about authors REAL exposure on tapastic.
Let's assume I'm a new author on tapastic, I've just uploaded one new chapter and I would like the readers to know at least that I'm here.
Now, that's a real problem!
1- I'm actually doing a manga, so I suppose my manga will be included in the famous MANGA MADNESS COLLECTION? Even better, I suppose that I can include it myself clicking a button on my comic editing page or adding a tag to automatically include it in the collection. But I can't.
Someone out there is including the comics in one collection or another, and I don't even know WHY a comic is included in a collection or not!! It's not a matter of subscibers, not a matter of visualizations, from what I can see. It's just that my manga isn't there.
So, this way is a no go. The reader can't find my manga this way.
2- let's try NEW AND NOTEWORTHY. Well, my manga is new on the site, so I could think this is the right place... right? but what of the NOTEWORTHY on the title? who decides that my manga is noteworthy? and where does the NEW ends and the NOTEWORTHY starts? the result is the same: my manga isn't there either. The reader can't find my manga this way.
3- let's skip the POPULAR COMICS, I know my manga will not be there. it's on the site from a relatively short period of time and I have only a handful of subscribers, so... never mind. The reader can't find my manga this way.
4- the ONLY way to find my manga is in the browsing page, sorting by date, and obviously my manga comes at page 26 even if I uploaded a new chapter only a few hours ago. Nearly impossible to reach.
I could avoid this by uploading a new page per day, maybe? But again, no, it appears that only NEW CHAPTERS are included in the most recent update, not single pages, so if I'm doing a story manga, and my chapters has to be 20 pages long, I just can't upload that much per day!! I'm screwed, again.
I'm a bit frustrated about all this, I have to say!
I have a manga and I think it's noteworthy (not only because it's MINE!), but it doesn't really matter how good a comic could be if nobody knows that it's here, right??
It appears that tapastic has no place at all for story manga that isn't famous yet, because there's simply no way for a story manga to be seen from tapastic possible readers.
This post by @ametueraspirant is a really good start to let the readers know of new comics under 100 subscribers, but does this incredible effort of a single reader really has to be the only way to let people know that a comic exists??
Also, just checked out your comic, seems like you post a lot of pages in one go. Some people have found that shorter, more frequent updates to be more effective at drawing subscribers: -often-should-i-upload-and-how-does-that-affect-viewer-activity/1247/4
thanks for the tips!
I was on inkblazers (I'm still there till the site is going to shut down in february) and exposure given from the site was way better. it's not a matter of posting on facebook so new readers can subscribe to tapastic, it's about the readers that already ARE on tapastic. they are comic readers, they are eager to read new comics, but I just seem to be unable to reach them. and it's a shame!