The View Slides Activity

View Slides is an Activity for viewing collections of image files stored in Zip archives.  Since this is identical to the CBZ format (with the CBZ format using a .cbz suffix on the file instead of .zip) View Slides can be used as a reading Activity for comic books.  The latest Read also supports the CBZ format so if you're using Sugar on a Stick you don't need View Slides to read comic books, but those running Sugar .82 will need it.

There are no large repositories of public domain comic books.  Most of the CBZ's and CBR's you'll find on the Internet violate someone's copyright, although there are a few legal ones on the Internet Archive that you can find by searching for "CBZ" or "CBR", such as theGunsmoke comic shown in the screen shots.  Gunsmoke was in the CBR format so I needed to convert it to CBZ.  In Windows you can do that with the free 7Zip utility that you can download here:

http://www.7-zip.org/ 

What you need to do is unpack the .cbr file to get the individual images, then zip them up and rename the .zip suffix of the new file to .cbz.

While there are not many legal free comic books, the CBZ format is an easy one to create and is a good choice for children who want to make their own e-books.  In addition to being a reader for this format, View Slides can create and edit files in this format.

Like Read Etexts, View Slides supports most versions of Sugar and will use a new-style toolbar if the version of Sugar supports it.  The screen shots in this chapter are a mix of old and new. 

The Read toolbar is the same as Read Etexts without the Underline button: 

Using the new style toolbar the most commonly used controls are always visible: 

Like the other reading Activities you can hide the toolbar and view images full screen: 

The Slides toolbar is used to organize the images in a .cbz file.  You can add images, delete them, rename them, and extract images to create entries in the Journal.  The Available Images column shows image files in the Journal as well as images on removable media like thumb drives and SD cards.  The Slideshow Image column shows the images in your .cbz.  When you select an entry in either column it will be previewed in the area above the image lists.