CDisplay: Difference between revisions

CDisplay

The application icon.
Developer(s)	David Ayton
Final release	1.8.1 / April 2004
Operating system	Microsoft Windows
Type	Image viewer
License	Freeware
Website	CDisplay Semi-Official

CDisplay is a freeware sequential image viewer utility for Microsoft Windows used to view images one at a time in the style of a comic book. It popularized the comic book archive file format. CDisplay was written to easily view JPEG, PNG and static GIF format images sequentially. The program's inspiration and implementation was partly because already existing programs were too general purpose and thus were awkward to use when simply viewing images sequentially.

Features

• Loads JPEG, PNG, and static GIF images which are automatically ordered alphabetically and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time.
• The images may be viewed from a folder or collected in a .zip, .rar, .ace, or .tar archive file.
• Page through the images sequentially and scroll around pages with single key presses.
• Many automatic page sizing options including choices to display one or two pages at one time. Image resizing uses Lanczos resampling for the best picture quality.
• No bloat caused by non-essential general purpose image processing features.
• Users can view the pictures as full screen (with or without mouse pointer) or in a window.

Files

CDisplay supports Comic Book Archive files, which have the extension .cbr, .cbz, .cbt, or .cba and are simply renamed RAR, ZIP, TAR, or ACE files, respectively. The files are archives of individual page images with a new extension for convenience. The standard icon for all comic file types extension is a comic balloon. The format was made popular by CDisplay but is now used by many other programs designed for reading comics.

CDisplay supports the display of JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TXT and also SFV files to confirm that the file is not corrupt, either "loose" or contained within RAR or ZIP files, as above.

• If a .txt file is within a folder or comic book archive file, it displays the comic's contents on file opening.
• If a .sfv file is within a folder or comic book archive file, it verifies the SFV data to confirm that the rest of the content is not corrupted.
• Automatic colour balance and yellow reduction if desired.

Limitations

CDisplay does not automatically add leading zeroes to sequentially numbered images inside Comic Book Archives. As such, it will read files in the order of 1, 10, 11, ..., 2, 20, 21, ..., rather than in the order of 1, 2, 3, ..., 10, 11, ... which is the more useful interpretation. To get around this minor flaw, leading zeros up to the highest digit in the sequence must be added explicitly. For example, the first page of an 80 page document would be 01, and for an 800 page document it would be 001.

CDisplay is also unable to display JPEG images with horizontal or vertical resolution greater than 2999 pixels at their original sizes. It instead resizes such JPGs to fit within the 2999 pixel limit. The same limitation does not apply to PNGs, which are displayed using a third-party TPNGImage component by Gustavo Daud.

Development

The program was compiled using Borland C++ Builder 5.0 and runs on various Windows platforms (both 32 and 64-bit) from Windows 98 onwards. CDisplay has no write capabilities, and therefore files are left untouched. A small amount of configuration data is written to the Windows registry.

CDisplay is no longer actively maintained as the original author has passed away, and the source is not available.

See also

• Comparison of image viewers

External links

• CDisplay original site, via Internet Archive Wayback Machine
• CDisplay, semi-official website