Comix Review

Comix is an image viewer that was specially designed for viewing comic books. Even though the special comic book format is rare, some people who are collectors might have large archives. I located some of them on torrents, but downloading was hard. I find this software very useful for collectors because they can scan the comic book collection share and also look at them over and over again, without depreciating the comic books.

It is not a sophisticated viewer but it has some neat features. It reads images in zip, rar or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files. Pretty cool huh?! When you open a file from a directory it displays thumbnails for all the files in that directory in the left part of the program. In the right part you can see the picture either in the original size, fit to window or two pages in the same view. You also have a cool option to only display a single image in double page mode if that image consists of two pages. The program assumes that an image consists of two pages if it's width is greater than it's height. Sometimes this option can be great.

The program has the possibility to display pictures in fullscreen and also has F11 as the default shortcut for this. It would be nice if in future versions it will be able to play pictures as a slide show. Even though when reading comic books this in not useful, it would be great when this software is used for viewing various pictures.

One of the unique features that I find very cool, is the magnifying

lens. For comic books enthusiasts this one is a must and for others it is an interesting tool. The lens has the default magnifying factor set to two, but it can be set to magnify up to five times. I think this is more than enough. One if the things I noticed is that the lens magnifies the scaled image, not the original one. I guess in some cases this can be good and in other, it can be bad. Anyway, we can modify the ratio if we are not satisfied.

In Comix you have the ability to add bookmarks in just a second, with a click of a mouse. Unfortunately you can't rename the bookmarks and in a large archive, it can be tricky to manage them. The program automatically names the bookmark the same name as the directory the picture is in and it also adds the number of the page. I hope in the future, the developer will enhance this feature because it has a lot of potential.

This program also has some basic transform capabilities which gives the ability to rotate and flip pictures. Even though this aren't sophisticated tools they really come in handy (mostly with pictures taken with cameras) and sometimes saves us from using other sophisticated tools software, like GIMP.

Comix supports four modes for scaling and the reason for this is that some are faster in detriment of picture quality and others are slower but provide the best pictures. I guess it all comes down to your personal choice, because options are for every needs.

In previous versions of this software you had the ability to hide menubar, toolbar, statusbar, scroolbars and thumbnails and in the 2.8 version, it has been added also the option to hide all. I like this because it helps me unclutter the programs window and concentrate on the picture. Anyway, let's not forget about full screen!

The Good

I like the fact that it handles pictures from directories and displays them in thumbnails. I also find pretty cool the magnifying lens.

The Bad

Regarding comic books I thing it would have been nice if you had the ability to scale images to a given resolution and also save them at that resolution. I also think that the fact you can't edit bookmarks is a minus to this feature.

The Truth

In some way, this software is unique. Even though is designed for comic books, it can easily be used with normal pictures. In fact that is why I'll use it for, because I'm not into comic books, and this is an excellent picture viewer.