CDisplay
Encyclopedia
CDisplay is a free sequential image viewer
Image viewer
An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical image; it can often handle various graphics file formats...

 utility for Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 used to view images one at a time in the style of a comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

. CDisplay was written to easily view JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, PNG and static GIF
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....

 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
    ZIP (file format)
    Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

    , .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
    Lanczos resampling
    Lanczos resampling is an interpolation method used to compute new values for sampled data. It is often used in multivariate interpolation, for example for image scaling , but can be used for any other digital signal...

     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 uses Comic Book Archive files, which have the extension .cbr or .cbz and are simply renamed RAR or ZIP
ZIP (file format)
Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...

 files, respectively. The files are archives of individual page images with a new extension for convenience. The standard icon for cbr and cbz 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
Text file
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...

 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 .CBR file, it displays the comic's contents on file opening.
  • If a .sfv
    SFV
    Simple file verification is a file format for storing CRC32 checksums of files to verify the integrity of files. SFV is used to verify that a file has not been corrupted, but does not otherwise verify its authenticity...

     file is within a folder or .CBR 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.


In creation of Comic Book Archive files containing sequentially numbered files (page 1, page 2...), CDisplay does not currently support the supposition of leading zeroes. As such, it will read files as 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.

Development

The program was compiled using Borland C++ Builder 5.0 and runs on various Windows platforms including Windows 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...

, NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...

, XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...

, Vista
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...

, and Windows 7. CDisplay has no write capabilities, and therefore files are left untouched. A small amount of configuration data is written to the Windows registry
Windows registry
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...

.

CDisplay is no longer actively maintained by the original author. CDisplayEx, an open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

clone, added new features.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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