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What app would people recommend for reading comics on a tablet? It's running android, but I can reflash it with linux if needed. I'm looking for the ability to load comics from a network drive and download/pin them locally for offline reading. Perfect Viewer does the former just fine, but not the latter -- it has a "download" command, but that only works on individual files and just dumps them all into your Downloads directory. My backup plan is to keep using PV + some kind of bullshit with syncthing to automatically sync some specific comic folders to the device, but that's a pain because it means I need to go to the server and change the syncthing configuration every time I want to pin a different set of comics, rather than just selecting them in the viewer.
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Jul 16, 2019 14:50
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Medullah posted:You can sync playlists of comics with Comicrack. It's got a ton of functionality but I always end up just using Perfect Viewer anyway I looked at ComicRack, but it looks like it requires a server and the server only runs on windows, so that's useless to me -- I'm not running upstairs to wake up the gaming desktop every time I want to read a comic.
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Jul 16, 2019 16:46
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site posted:Can't you just run the windows program in wine or something I guess I could set up xvfb on the server and run comicrack inside wine inside xvfb or something, but at that point just using syncthing instead starts to look more appealing.
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Jul 16, 2019 17:37
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Zachack posted:Does your tablet let you use SD cards? That would be far too easy. It has generous internal storage, but not generous enough. It's honestly kind of poo poo except that it has a very nice screen, and getting a less poo poo tablet with an equivalent-or-better screen would be pretty expensive. ZRM posted:ComiCat will apparently let you do a cloud sync, with like Google cloud, Dropbox, etc, though I'm not sure if it'll do what you're wanting. It won't; there's lots of clients that have a "download your comics from the cloud!" feature, but that would require me to upload them to the cloud first. Dsmif posted:Ubooquity Server (https://vaemendis.net/ubooquity/) on your computer and Kuboo (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sethchhim.kuboo) on Android. I use this for with Chunky on my iPad and it's amazing. That, on the other hand, looks like it might be exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks! E: No it's not, in fact it has exactly the same problems as Perfect Viewer -- you can only select individual files for download, not entire folders, and if it loses its net connection it also loses all library organization and just kicks you over to the "Downloads" tab, which is a reverse-chronological list of everything it's ever downloaded with no further categorization. It also doesn't support tap-to-turn-page. Ubooquity itself was pleasantly easy to set up and I'll probably keep using it, at least. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Jul 17, 2019 |
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Jul 17, 2019 13:01
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Zachack posted:I'm not certain if there is an android build but comicglass on ios let's you download folders and saves them as folders... I think. I have it pull from my network hdd. No fancy tagging or much tracking, though. It basically acts like a file system on a pc. Yeah, I don't care about tagging and can live without read/unread tracking, the filesystem layout is my metadata. Looks like comicglass is iOS only, though.
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Jul 17, 2019 20:17
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Snapes N Snapes posted:Europe goon here and I just moved and sold a ton of physical comics next to moving a ton as well (also books) and I'm thinking 'never again' so I'm going to be making the switch to digital comics and books. For comics you will want a full-colour LCD tablet (as in, not an e-ink display). Mine has an 11.6" 1920x1080 display and that works fine; could probably go a bit smaller. I can't really give any advice on software ecosystem because mine's a clunky bespoke setup where the tablet runs SUSE and boots into a browser pointing at an Ubooquity instance on the family server, which works great for me but is probably not a good general recommendation. You can read ebooks on that too, but the LCD is not as nice for long periods reading text as an e-ink display, and a tablet large enough to read comics on comfortably won't fit well in a pocket or purse. LCDs also generally don't display well in sunlight, and it'll have significantly shorter battery life than an e-ink device. So if you want something good for reading text on, you will probably want a separate e-reader. We have a megathread for those over in IYG, but the main contenders these days are Kindle (Amazon) or Kobo (~everything else).
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Dec 23, 2019 19:57
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Uthor posted:On Android, I always read the PDFs through one of the PDF apps (Google Docs, Adobe). I spent a while taffing around with sync-to-device + local reading, but the problem I had was that comics are large enough, and my tablet has little enough storage, that I was constantly shuffling files around, which was annoying. Then I tried serving them over HTTP or SSHFS and using a reader that supported network fetches, but didn't like any of the reader software I tried. Eventually I installed ubooquity on my home server, and just started reading in the browser, both on my laptop and my tablet; it lacks some of the features cdisplay has, but has the virtue of working everywhere with no further loving around and keeping my read status in sync no matter what device I'm reading on. I also hacked together a userJS for it to make the UI a bit nicer -- show read/unread status of books without opening them, show status for directories, and slightly better controls in the actual book reading UI.
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May 5, 2020 16:27
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Dsmif posted:The guy who made Chunky Comic Reader is working on a new reader that reads comics from the cloud (Google Drive/OneDrive/Ubooquity/etc...) by default and allows you to download if required. It's only in beta testing at the moment, but it looks good. It was sitting in development hell for a while, but he's recently returned to it so I'm hoping it will be released soon. It should work with any theme, but I've only really tested it with the Grey theme since that's what I use. Themes are just images and CSS, though, and the script relies entirely on element classes/IDs/types and doesn't care about the styles or what images are in use. As for where you put it -- if your browser has userJS support (either directly, like older versions of Opera, or through an extension like Violentmonkey for Chrome or Firefox), just paste it into that and edit the header to replace @include https://my.ubooquity.server/comics/* with the URL of your server. If you use multiple ubooq servers add an @include line for each one of them. If you can't use userJS in the browser, you'll have to inject it server-side. I have a NixOS configuration for doing that with nginx here, and I can post the generated nginx.conf fragment if you need it. A quick rundown of the features: Reading - the progress bar is replaced with a slider you can use to jump around in the book - you can fast-exit the book by tapping right twice (at the end) or left twice (at the start) rather than opening the menu Bookshelf (all of these features require "save reading progress on server" turned on, they don't work with local storage) - The "read/download" interstitial is gone; click on a book cover to open it or the title to download it - Individual books will display a page count and 📕 icon if you haven't started reading them, a pages read/total count and 📖 icon if you have, and a check mark if they're finished - Directories you haven't viewed (since installing the script) will display ?📁 - Directories you have viewed will display a file count and 📁 if you haven't read any books in them, books read/total and 📂 if you've read some books in them, and a file count and check mark if you've read all the books in them. - "reload" and "mark all read" (or "mark all unread" if you've read everything in that directory) buttons added at the top Known Issues - no support for locally-stored read progress - directory progress just shows ? for unvisited directories even when it knows how many books are inside - directory progress doesn't distinguish between "you've not opened any of the books in this folder" and "you've opened some but haven't finished any" - if a directory has multiple pages it only shows you the status for the most recently viewed page rather than for the entire directory; this can be mitigated by setting "# of comics per bookshelf page" to a high number in the admin control panel - it takes a moment to load when viewing the bookshelf, since it needs to make 1-2 extra queries to the server for each book on the shelf Medullah posted:I use Kuboo to read comics from my desktop, it works pretty well. My dream app is something like Plex for comics, tracking what's read and unread, gathers metadata, etc. Since Humble Bundle does comics I've gotten a lot of miscellaneous junk that's a pain to organize. Yeah, Ubooq is the closest I've found for that but it doesn't do any sort of metadata fetching or help you organize your stuff, it just serves a directory tree. I've hacked together a bunch of shell scripts to help organize comics as I get them but it's not a great solution and very specific to my setup.
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May 6, 2020 00:29
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lifg posted:I did the same! Yours are considerably more sophisticated than mine (except for the bit in mine that tries to fix cases where things are named, e.g., "Ch.10" - "Ch.10.5" - "Ch.11", which don't sort correctly)! I've spent most of my time working on the reading experience, since I spend a lot more time reading comics than importing them.
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May 7, 2020 15:13
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lifg posted:https://groupees.com has bundles too. Like right now they have a top tier Humanoids bundle with some of the best euro comics ever written. I've never heard of any of these; anything in particular you'd recommend, or just "get the whole thing and poke each one to see if it grabs you"?
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May 7, 2020 16:19
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I've avoided getting stuff on Comixology precisely because I wanted to make local backups, maybe it's time for me to revisit that decision.
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May 7, 2020 20:40
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I'm always down for big weird space opera. Went ahead and bought the bundle, only to find out that (a) you have to download each of the CBZs individually and (b) they download as "<a bunch of digits>_r.cbz". This is bullshit, so here's a shell script to download them for you, with the correct titles. Export your groupees.com cookies to cookies.txt and then: code:
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May 8, 2020 04:35
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Medullah posted:Yeah! It works great for Marvel Unlimited. I use mine with Ubooquity and the Kuboo app to stream comics from my PC (Humble Bundle ones, for example). The only thing that is lacking is a sleek Plex like interface that tracks read/unread easily. I wrote a thing that helps with that -- has unread/in progress/finished indicators for individual books and entire directories, "mark whole directory read/unread" button, replaces the "new comics" button at the top level with a "resume last" button that jumps you to whatever folder you were in last time you were reading, and has some improvements to the actual reader interface. This only works with the actual web UI, though, not separate clients like kuboo.
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Jun 17, 2020 17:01
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Medullah posted:Oh nice! I sometimes read from my Yoga so this will help. Yay! It should work in any violentmonkey/greasemonkey/tampermonkey style browser extension (don't forget to edit the @include line at the top to match the URL to your ubooq server), or you can inject it server-side using a reverse proxy like nginx. You'll need to make sure that "store bookmarks in cookies instead of the server" in the Ubooq advanced admin settings is off (which I think is the default setting); it relies on the server-side bookmark data to tell which books have been read.
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Jun 17, 2020 21:41
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Dsmif posted:Keep an eye on Komga it's early in development but it is basically Plex for comics. Open source as well. I tested it out and then switched from ubooquity because it's what I've been looking for. No native apps yet, but devs are working on them. Oh that looks pretty sweet, definitely going to investigate that
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Jun 17, 2020 23:04
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Rincewinds posted:Humble Bundle have an Image bundle, with some complete collections. That's a whole bunch of good comics, but one recurring gripe I have with Humble's comic bundles is that they make no effort in the UI to differentiate between: - a complete run - a complete run so far of a comic still being published - an incomplete run of a finished comic - an incomplete run of a still-being-published comic - an incomplete run but the rest of the volumes are available at a higher tier in the same bundle and also, when something is multiple volumes, the description is only for the first one for some reason, so you end up spending a lot of time running around to other websites to get info on what you're actually getting in the bundle.
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Jul 2, 2020 19:13
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Dsmif posted:Keep an eye on Komga it's early in development but it is basically Plex for comics. Open source as well. I tested it out and then switched from ubooquity because it's what I've been looking for. No native apps yet, but devs are working on them. So I ended up checking out Komga and it has a lot of promise and definitely a sleeker UI than Ubooquity, but it's also completely useless for me because it assumes every comic has embedded metadata or, failing that, that each comic library is just a collection of one folder per series and everything in that folder belongs to that series. This is fine if your comic library is structured around that assumption, but mine isn't, and with no browse-by-on-disk-folder-structure option this means it's basically impossible for me to ever find anything I'm looking for in it. I'm keeping an eye on it in case they add that option but for now I'm sticking with Ubooquity.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:56
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Dsmif posted:Komga is attempting to be Plex for comics. It's pretty good and it's being actively developed, so its progressively getting better all the time. Komga has really nice UX, but it comes with one big caveat: the only folder structure it understands is "<series>/<issue>" and apart from that it absolutely depends on having proper document metadata embedded in the files. In particular, there is no way to browse by filesystem structure, or derive metadata other than series/title from directory path or filename, so unless your library is already structured like that you will have to make sure all your files are properly tagged. If that works for you, it's pretty nice; it doesn't work for me, so I use Ubooquity, which is worse than Komga in quite a lot of ways but does, critically, let you browse the library by filesystem structure. I've also heard of lanraragi but haven't had a chance to try it out and have no idea if it's any good.
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Oct 1, 2021 22:10
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So, Lone Wolf & Cub is one of those classics that I see mentioned all the time but know very little about, and I've never even heard of the other stuff listed there. Is it still worth reading today, coming at it with neither nostalgia nor academic interest in the evolution of the form?Skwirl posted:Are they left to right or right to left? I'm way too old and it hurts my brain to read right to left on a longer work. I found some sample pages that I think are from this edition (Dark Horse 28-volume) and they're flipped, so they read left-to-right. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Nov 16, 2021 |
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Nov 16, 2021 04:13
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Cloks posted:companies Amazon's size don't make decisions to benefit the consumer, they're made to burnish resumes and create the illusion of internal progress Yeah, you don't get promoted for keeping a thing that already works well running, you get promoted for launching a new thing that replaces it. As for where I get my comics -- generally the same places I get my ebooks (humble store, kobo, etc), and then pry the DRM off them if needed so I can actually read them on my tablet.
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Feb 13, 2022 01:30
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Baby Proof posted:New Oni Press Humble Bundle This looks pretty sweet, although one thing that always bothers me about these bundles is that it's hard to tell which things in it are complete - e.g. are the four volumes of Queen and Country there the complete run, or will I end up needing to track down another four elsewhere?
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Feb 26, 2022 13:05
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hadji murad posted:How exactly does that work? Is there a guide? I would like to liberate my collection and put it in another app. I don't have time to go into complete detail here, but I was recently setting this up myself in order to read (on my Kobo) a book that was released only on the Kindle store, so here's a quick summary based on my experience. N.b. I've only tried this on prose books, not comics. - install the Kindle client version 1.17 (later versions download in a different format that is not as well understood) - log into your Kindle account using it - install Calibre ebook manager - install the DeDRM plugin for Calibre - Start up Calibre and go to Preferences→Plugins→DeDRM→Customize→Kindle for Mac/PC and click the green +; it should automatically extract your DRM keys from your Kindle install - download any books you want to read in the Kindle app, then import the AZW files into Calibre and it should automatically peel off the DRM as they're imported. That's for Windows/Mac. If you're on Linux it gets more annoying; you will need to install Kindle in wine, and may also need to install Python 2.7 and use the kindlekey.pyw script to extract the keys, as the plugin has issues automatically extracting them from wine installs.
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Mar 10, 2022 01:34
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I'm loving torn on this, because there's a lot of good stuff there but the stuff I'm really interested in (primarily Monstress and Saga) isn't finished, so I'll just end up sitting on it for years.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:46
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Skwirl posted:Bitch Planet is really good, and even though they aren't finished, there's a poo poo ton of Monstress and Saga to go through before you're all caught up. The problem is that if I read it now, by the time it's finished I won't remember anything about it because that will be many years and hundreds of books ago, so I'll have to reread the whole thing from the beginning anyways! These days I generally just don't start reading things at all until the whole thing is finished because of that; I might read the first chapter or volume to see if it's something I want to read, but not any further than that.
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Mar 11, 2022 04:37
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Skwirl posted:I have some bad news about how serialized comic books work. Just because something is serialized doesn't mean it can't end, though! Transmetropolitan, Buck Godot, Wicked+Divine, and Lumberjanes, for example, all finished out their run and then ended. Same deal with most manga -- it's published one chapter at a time but sooner or later the story ends. Even settings that are in perpetual publication like Marvel often have story arcs or miniseries that eventually conclude and can then be read, like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Gwenpool, Loki: Agent of Asgard,¹ and Nextwave. And in the case of Saga specifically, IIRC the author has said that they do have an end planned for it and the story is currently somewhere in the second half. Not sure about Monstress. I realize that a lot of people, probably most people, read this stuff chapter-by-chapter or volume-by-volume as it's released, but that doesn't work well for me, and my backlog of reading material is already so huge that it's hard to justify reading something unfinished when (a) I have no guarantee it will ever be finished -- even if the author has an ending planned, they might run out of money or lose interest or die before they conclude it -- and (b) doing so guarantees I'll have to reread it multiple times just to make sense of it, even if it's not something I would otherwise enjoying enough to be worth multiple readthroughs. ¹ although that one kind of hosed it up by having something like three massive universe-rewriting crossover events during its run that it was obligated to incorporate, to the severe detriment of it actually making sense
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Mar 11, 2022 14:32
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plainswalker75 posted:Oh hell yeah: Strangers in Paradise sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would completely hate, but Echo and Rachel Rising both look interesting.
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Apr 10, 2022 19:03
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Lobok posted:What's this about izneo? Can you redeem and download the comics from izneo and then not use it for do I have to read them through that app as well? Nope. App-only, supports "offline reading" but it's "you can ask the app to precache some stuff", not "you can download a DRM-free copy". There's probably some way to strip the DRM using the web viewer, but while this bundle looks cool it doesn't look cool enough for me to put the work in, especially when I haven't even finished reading the take from the last (actually DRM-free) hundle I bought.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:24
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:I'm not a huge fan of the new Comixology reader and the fact that I can't download the DRM-free version of any comics since Amazon redid the subscriptions (at least the old ones are still available). I've only been subscribing to one comic recently anyway (Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda) - so I was wondering if there was a place that sold the DRM-free version of Image comics for download, ideally in CBZ format. I can set my own reminder to check for it, don't need a subscription. Google Play has them but only does export to PDF. Marjorie Liu doesn't sell them for Monstress on her website as far as I can tell If you can export to PDF from Google Play, you can usually convert those to CBZ pretty easily.The pdfimages tool (part of poppler) will extract all the images in the PDF and for most PDF comics there's just one big image per page, so you can then just zip those back up and you have a CBZ. If the PDF is doing something weird you can use convert (from imagemagick) to basically "print to image files" and then zip those, although this often results in massively increased file size.
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Apr 30, 2022 22:00
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They were published online a while ago and I read the first volume and enjoyed it, I want to get back to it and read the rest...someday. It looks like the version on Humble is the "Complete Elfquest" edition, which is very high resolution but also B&W; most of the comics were originally published in colour, and the (print) Complete edition was published B&W to keep costs down.
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Mar 3, 2023 03:29
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Xenomrph posted:Yeah but the Red Sonja comics aren’t “porn” so it’s a bit of a weird comparison to make. Given the cover art on most of these I can see how someone might come to that conclusion, tbh. Is this patient zero for the "mail bikini" "armour" style?
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Jul 8, 2023 22:09
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Uthor posted:A nerd thing that doesn't matter for reading books: Ordering is up to the reader software, it's not like EPUB where there's an internal "spine" telling it what order the files inside should be read in. Generally speaking it's just ordered based on a lexicographic sort of filenames inside, so just number them in order and you're fine. Stuff like "page004-005.png" works because it sorts after "page003.png" and before "page006.png". The only thing you need to watch out for is forgetting to zero-pad the page numbers; If you have something containing, say, pages 1-15 (rather than 01-15), they will sort as: code:Some file browsers are smart enough to go "aah, these filenames have numbers in them so I should sort them as numbers rather than as text", but most comic readers are not.
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Jul 9, 2023 01:33
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Medullah posted:Yeah library management was a big thing to me. All I wanted was something like Plex for comics, where I could have my books on my main computer and "stream" to my tablet. YACreader was great looking but didn't have Android. The Cover App works PERFECTLY for my Windows tablet, but alas it's Windows only. But it's nice to have cover art and all that download automatically I've been using Codex for this, and am quite happy with it. It doesn't need a dedicated app, either, the browser reading experience is quite nice. Biggest problem is that it can't download for offline reading, although you could probably get that using an OPDS client.
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Nov 1, 2023 23:13
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