Reader Will Simpson has a comics-related question. He writes:
I’m a wannabe artist, and I have a few of my own “comics” saved as JPEG files. I’d really like to view them in a comics-reader app on my iPad, but I don’t know how to format them. Do you know?
I do. Comics apps such as Comic Zeal are compatible with a couple of DRM-free comic book file formats, namely .cbr and .cbz. Those are both compressed formats, related to RAR and ZIP files, respectively.
Converting your JPEG files to a comics-compatible format is a cinch. First, confirm that you’ve numbered your images in the correct page order, naming them My Comic-001-001.jpg
, My Comic-001-002.jpg
, My Comic-001-003.jpg
, for example (where the first set of digits is the issue number and the second set is the page number). Without the page numbers in the filenames, the pages might not display in the proper sequence.
Place the pages in a folder, and name the folder with the comic title and issue number, entering something like My Comic #1
. Now Control-click (right-click) the folder and choose Compress “nameoffolder”. The folder will be converted to a .zip archive called (using our example) My Comic #1.zip. Change the .zip extension to .cbz
.
And that’s it. You can now import your comic into your comics-reader app via the usual methods. With Comic Zeal, the method involves tethering your iPad to your Mac, launching iTunes, selecting your iPad within iTunes, choosing the Apps tab, locating the Comic Zeal entry in the applications area, and adding your .cbz files to copy them to the iPad.