Override page display order in a comic

Some cbr/cbz files I've encountered have pages out of order, or sometimes have two-page splashed stored both as two single pages and as a single two-page scan. Sometimes they two single pages immediately precede or follow the two-page, sometimes, the two-page scans are after all the single page scans. I'd like to be able to look at thumbnails of all the pages in a book and drag them into the order of proper display. It's possible to do this by tearing apart the container files (cbr, cbz, tar, etc) and reordering them, but that requires understanding all the container formats, having the tools to unpack and repack them, and in general doing a lot of fiddly work. Dragging them into a preferred order is a lot easier.

See my response here: www.yacreader.com/forum/suggestions/275-...ages-of-a-comic#1071

The container formats are all just simple archives. You can open anything YACReader can open with 7zip, the only exception being .pdf files. Personally, I don't think it's the comic reader applications job to fix a bad comic book file and I don't like the idea of messing around with the contents of an archive from YACReader. Files inside a comic book archive are ordered by their filename and thus will need to be renamed inside the archive to show up at another place. Worst case, depending on the naming scheme used, you have to rename multiple files just to move one around. Lot's of ways to screw up here

My suggestion: If we're to implement this, we should do this as a "rename file" option. In combination with drag and drop support we could simply evaluate the intended new position and suggest a new filename based on that. For example, if we moved 099_comic_page.jpg between 021_... and 022_..., we'd suggest something like 021a_...

Unfortunately display order isn’t as simple as just renaming — different software & different operating environments use different encodings & sorting algorithms (Windows is particularly notorious for that) and people creating the files tend to base the names of the internal files on their personal experince — to guarantee a correct ordering you have to either rename everything with a very simple and standard layout or go with an epub style solution (a .opf document that lists the files in the correct order — and since that would include metadata potentially, if an opf file was included, using it wouldn’t be a bad alternative) …

001.jpg, 002.jpg, ... nnn.jpg always work in any software and operative system. The problem is that people try to put too much information in the images' file names.

I don't like people repacking comic files. Keeping the HASH of a file is the way that it will survive along the time among the community. Lots of people are working hard for keeping golden era comics, completing series, etc. P2P networks are the way for sharing all those comics, and if you repack a comic, then you are dividing the sources for this comic.

Not sure when I am going to have time to dig into this.

Simplest most standard solution is to keep an external opf file in an associated library — it would store the spine (read-order) and meta-data in a recognized fashion and not affect the actual archive file.

Uhm, weird. Are you trying the patched version in windows 7? Try the beta as is.

No, the patched one is on the desktop of my primary system, I unzipped the beta separately to the Win7’s local drive

I was betting that I had asked you this before, and I was looking for the message, sorry I have crossed posts