ACBF Viewer is a viewer application capable of reading ACBF, CBZ 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 than can be sorted and filtered by different kinds of available metadata as well as various charts drwan on these data can be seen.
Dependencies
ACBF Viewer uses/depends on following libraries:
- GTK (pygtk) 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
Optional:
- Unrar to open CBR files
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
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.
Command to extract CBR files
This configuration item defines the command to extract CBR files (by default Unrar freeware program is expected to be installed on the system). This option can be found in preferences.xml (<unrar_location> element) inside configuration directory.
By default on Windows it is set to: "C:\Program Files\Unrar\unrar" x
On linux it is: unrar x
ACBF Viewer then adds CBR filename and temporary directory as destination where the content is extracted: unrar x [source_file.cbz] [destination dir]
Screenshots
Screenshots from ACBF Viewer can be seen at: https://plus.google.com/photos/110989843476988874482/albums/5692035097709963025