As digital comics have become a cornerstone of comics reading, several companies have offered their own version of a technology which allows the panels to transition for digital reading. Comixology has “Guided View,” Marvel has its Unlimited technology; iVerse offers uView. The iVerse systems can be applied by users to comics viewed through their platforms, and Comixology also allows publishers to adapt their own comics.

Yugoslavian software developer Zoran Bosnjak writes to inform us of a new open source software that allows you to apply this kind of technology to any comic. It’s called Comic Smart Panels Creator & Viewer (available for Windows for now) which allows fluid panel animations and scaling for any kind of comic. Balloon sequence can also be defined, as seen with the Thrillbent comics and other “ecomics” platforms.

The files are stored in Comic Panel Definitions (CPD) files which are JSON files (with meta information about panel positions and dimensions.) While these can be read by the companion “Viewer” program, they should be importable to other viewing platforms.

As you can see from the screenshots below this still seems to be a but tech-y and not necessarily a weekend project for most folks.Both Guided View and uView are already available to those who want it, and have perhaps a bit less of a learning curve (the issue of the Maxx shown in the YouTube video is perhaps the least likely candidate for any kind of guided view.) . However, the more software the more people have, the more results you’ll see.
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4 COMMENTS

  1. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the author of this tool has released the source code for the program anywhere. So until they do, it would not be precise to say this tool is “open-source”.

    It would be nice to see the specification of the CPD format put up somewhere, so other tools can be built to create and read it.

  2. Dear Mr. Jose de Leon,

    this is Zoran Bosnjak speaking, author of this software. First of all thank you very much for your interest and your comment, this is my personal project I did in spare time for a past couple of months, and I am really hoping it would be useful and interesting for you, for Comic artists and for independent Publishers, who do not want Comixology or iVerse platform for any of reasons. Speaking of Open Source, project source is on GitHub (newest version coming soon; also just a friendly note, code is spaghetti soup, I currently don’t have time to refactor it), you can browse code @ https://github.com/zoran123456/Comic-Smart-Panels. CPD definitions are JSON files (you create them in Creator), best way to view JSON is with online JSON viewer “http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/”. I will soon publish documentation for JSON file (but is really nothing complicated).

    Thanks again for your interest and comment.

    Zoran

  3. Hey Zoran,

    That’s awesome… it’s a nice design tool. The spec for the CPD JSON definition would be useful for making tools that are cross-platform. Thanks for the pointers!

    Your stuff appears to work with CBR/CBZ archives, but is similar in concept to “guided-view” tools like the ‘pulp’ tools for online comics from Al-Jazeera:

    https://github.com/ajam/pulp
    https://github.com/ajam/pulp-press

    -Jose

  4. Hello,

    I have my own comic app in Myanmar and I want to use your smart panel tool. But one thing not clear is how can I use your output file(CPD) in our andoird & iOS app?
    Can you help us to get done to be able to publish to EPUB?

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