Which comic files become a PDF, and in what page order
Comics downloaded from a store or shared by a scan group often arrive as a .cbz or .cbr file, which a comic reader app opens and almost nothing else does. A PDF opens on any phone, tablet, e-reader or computer, and prints. This tool unpacks a CBZ in your browser and lays its pictures out as pages, one picture to a page, without redrawing them.
Updated
Which tool you need
A .cbz file from a comic store, a scan group or your own collection
This tool, as it is. The pages come out in the order a comic reader shows them, and you can move, turn or drop any of them before the PDF is made.
A .cbr file
Not here: a CBR is a RAR archive, and this site has no way to open RAR. Many comic reader and archive apps can save the same comic as a CBZ, which this tool then takes.
A folder of page pictures that was never packed into an archive
Choose the pictures themselves in Image to PDF, which takes JPG, PNG, WebP and the other common formats directly.
An omnibus with more pages than one PDF here can hold
An archive past that ceiling is refused whole, so repack it as smaller CBZ files, one per volume or chapter, make a PDF from each, and join them in order with Merge PDF.
A finished comic PDF too large to send or store
Compress PDF can shrink the pictures, at a cost to their sharpness that it shows before you choose.
How the page order is worked out
A comic archive has no table of contents: the only record of which page comes next is the name of each picture. Pages are sorted by their full path inside the archive, reading runs of digits as numbers and ignoring capital letters, so page 9 lands before page 10 whether or not the names were padded with zeros, and a chapter folder keeps its pages together.
An archive whose pages were named carelessly, such as a cover called z-cover.jpg, will come out in the order those names imply. That is why the pages are shown before anything is made: drag a page into place, turn a two-page spread that was saved sideways, or remove a credits or advertisement page.
What happens to each picture
A JPG page goes into the PDF with its bytes untouched, so there is no second round of compression to blur fine linework. A PNG stays lossless. WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF and TIFF pages are opened by your browser and saved as they appear on screen.
Whatever else the archive carries is skipped: the ComicInfo.xml file some apps add, macOS's hidden __MACOSX folder and dot files, thumbnail databases and text notes. A picture your browser cannot open is named in a notice and left out rather than becoming a blank page.
Choosing a page size
Keeping each picture's own shape gives a PDF that reads like the comic, with no white border, and suits a tablet or an e-reader. A4 or US Letter with a margin suits printing at home, where every sheet needs to be the same size and the printer cannot reach the paper's edge.
What to know before you start
- CBR, CB7 and CBT archives are not opened; only CBZ is.
- One PDF holds up to 300 pages, or 100 on a device with less memory to spare.
- A picture format the browser cannot decode, such as AVIF in an older browser, is skipped and named.
- Speech balloons and captions stay part of the pictures, so the PDF's words cannot be searched or copied.