Advanced Comic Book Format Wiki
Acbfv

ACBF Viewer is a viewer application capable of reading ACBF, CBZ/CBR and ACV comic book file formats. It is written in Python programming language. Currently there are versions for Linux and Windows. It is distributed under GNU GPL version 3.

ACBF Viewer is capable of displaying comic books in 3 viewing modes (one page, zoom to page width and zoom on a certain frame/comic book panel), it displays various comic book metadata, table of contents, can easily switch between different text-layers (translations). Text-layers are drawn automatically to fit into defined text-areas (bubbles), different fonts can be defined for semantic tags used on text-layers. Comic book library can be filled with comic books which then can be sorted and filtered by different kinds of available metadata as well as various charts based on these data can be seen.

Supported Formats[]

Comicbook Formats[]

ACBF Viewer can read CBZ (ZIP) and CBR (RAR) comic book archives. For reading RAR archives unrar program needs to be installed. From comic book archives besides ACBF metadata (*.acbf file) it can also read Droid Comic Viewer metadata including panel definitions (ACV) and ComickRack metadata (ComicInfo.xml).

Image Formats[]

ACBF Viewer support following image formats:

  • JPG
  • PNG
  • GIF
  • WebP
  • BMP

Dependencies[]

ACBF Viewer uses/depends on following libraries:

  • GTK (pygobject) to draw user interface
  • lxml (python-lxml) to work with XML files
  • Python Imaging Library (PIL, or its fork Pillow) to work with images
  • Matplotlib library to draw charts on comic book library statistics
  • Patoolib to open CBR/CBT/CB7 ... files (actual program to extract non CBZ files must be present in the system as well (e.g. unrar, 7zip etc.)

Download and Installation[]

Linux[]

Ubuntu PPA repository[]

The easiest way to install and receive automatic updates is to add ACBF PPA (Personal Package Archive) repository to your system. ACBF PPA repository is located at: https://launchpad.net/~acbf-development-team/+archive/ubuntu/acbf. To add this repository to your system run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:acbf-development-team/acbf
sudo apt-get update

... and now you can install ACBF Viewer deb package:

sudo apt-get install acbf-viewer

Installation from source[]

You will need to install required libraries first:

sudo apt-get install python-lxml python-imaging python-matplotlib patool

Download and extract linux source package (for example ACBFViewer-0.96_linux.tar.gz) from project page at: https://launchpad.net/acbf/+download. Then navigate to the directory where you extracted it and run:

sudo ./install.py install

After install finishes properly you should be able to find ACBF Viewer in Applications Launcher.

To uninstall run:

sudo ./install.py uninstall

Windows[]

No installation is needed for Windows version. Just download the windows ACBF Viewer package (e.g. ACBFViewer-0.96_win32.zip) from https://launchpad.net/acbf/+download, extract it and run acbfv.exe.

Used system directories[]

ACBF Viewer uses 2 directories:

Temporary directory - is used to store temporary files from extracted CBZ archives. By default it is located in /tmp/acbfv (Linux version) or C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temp (Windows XP) or C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Temp (Windows 7).

Configuration directory - contains ACBF Viewer configuration file (preferences.xml), history of viewed comic book (history.xml) and comic book library file (library.xml). Configuration directory is located in ~/.config/acbfv (Linux version) or C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\acbfv_conf (Windows XP) or C:\Users\[user_name]\acbfv_conf (Windows 7).

Hidden settings[]

Custom temporary directory[]

From version 0.97 upwards you may set custom directory that will be used as a temporary directory by ACBF Viewer. This option can be found in preferences.xml (<tmpfs> element) inside configuration directory.

If you are running linux and your linux distribution supports tmpfs you may change this option from "False" to /dev/shm. ACBF Viewer will use /dev/shm/acbfv directory instead of default /tmp/acbfv as a temporary file storage. Tmpfs uses RAM and swapfile instead of physical space on disk. Setting this option will reduce disk I/O and speed up loading and viewing CBZ files but may quickly fill up available RAM and swap space if large CBZ files are opened. So use with caution.

Screenshots[]

Screenshots from ACBF Viewer can be seen at: https://plus.google.com/photos/110989843476988874482/albums/5692035097709963025