New Features

Support for new image & archive formats

• Added support for HEIC/HEIF & AVIF images. JpegXL support coming soon.
• Support for RAR5 file archives. This as been the default for WinRAR for some time, and the old format isn't even available anymore in v7+ of WinRAR.

Virtual Tags

You can now create new fields by combining existing ones using the functionality of the Caption setting found in ComicRack.ini. These virtual tags can be used for sorting, grouping, stacking, and as smart lists.

• Example: Use [{SeriesGroup} - ][{Series}] to sort/group by Series Group if it exists; otherwise, it will sort by Series.
• Set a Virtual Tag and change the List Layouts to this new tag to modify the text below the thumbnail.
• Functions to manipulate fields, such as extracting substring, replacing text, using regex, and conditional statements.

Open With

ComicRack can now open some files in external programs. For instance, set 7-Zip to view archives or configure your favorite reader to override ComicRack's internal viewer, using it instead when double-clicking. (the internal viewer can still be accessed via the context menu).

Important

No validation is done that the external program can open the specified file.

Merge Pages

In the pages view, selecting two pages allows you to merge them via the context menu for spreads that aren’t joined.

• To change the page order for right-to-left reading, either sort pages by descending order or set the Manga field to Yes (Right to Left).
• This change is only in the cache, and the book must be exported to save the changes.
• Reversing this is easy by using Refresh on a page (the second page will need to be changed from Deleted to Story).

New PDF Engine

The default PDF engine is now Google's PDFium, allowing you to read complex PDFs without Ghostscript (If you still want to use GhostScript, you must explicitly enable it; even if it’s installed).

Settings (in ComicRack.ini) to customize your usage:

• The PdfEngineToUse setting replaces DisableGhostscript. Valid options are Pdfium, Native (previous default), & Ghostscript.
• Since Pdfium can read complex PDFs, it will render them to a fixed size instead of extracting images like Native did.
  • You can change the rendered dimensions by editing PdfiumImageSize.

Various

• Support for .CBR & .RAR in RAR5 format.
• Tags are now saved in the ComicInfo.xml.
• The Published field didn't use Windows regional settings, so Published (Regional) was added.
• Added the -local command line switch, to have the program load in portable mode.
• New Smart List fields (will reset your database if used in an older version):
  • Is Missing, Web & also all the Virtual Tags.

All changes can be found here.