Feature request: Comic Book Viewer

[candre23]

Comics and manga are generally stored as CBR or CBZ files. These are simply RAR and ZIP files respectively, which have been renamed. These archives contain all the pages of the comic as individual images. It would be very helpful if copyparty could natively display comics and manga as it does with PDFs and individual images.

This is an example of a python application which manipulates CBR/CBZ files: https://github.com/kurotom/comicpy

[9001]

thanks for the idea, but unfortunately this will be very difficult to do, due to limitations of the current architecture. Due to performance reasons (and partially to keep things simple), the abstraction layer against the filesystem is really thin -- the code generally refers to files and folders by their filesystem paths, and thus there's an assumption that everything is just normal files on a regular filesystem. To be able to read files from an archive, a lot of this would need to be redone.

It is possible that a change like this will need to happen sometime far into the future, for example to gain better support for things like using S3 as a storage backend, and in that case it would be easy (and awesome) to also add this feature -- but it is too much work just to support cbr/cbz files (even though I'd really like to).

There is also the fact that the current image viewer isn't very well suited for reading manga -- for that purpose, it would be great if it could zoom/pan images, and maybe also have a side-by-side view of pages, of course with the option for rigt-to-left reading.

Oh and finally, I don't think it would be smart to support cbr, because it is rar compressed, and the rar algorithm has some truly crufty code -- it would be an unnecessary security risk. CBZ is fine though :-)