In this hub series I'll talk about Manga Software: not only Software to read manga but also Software to draw manga, if you happen to be an artist! There are indeed several tools that you can buy or even freeware programs that can help you a lot when it comes to manga. Let's start in this chapter with the manga reading department :)

Software to Read Manga

Why do I need software to read manga, you may ask? Can I just not use the typical manga reading sites like OneManga or MangaFox?

Well, you can, but most of those:

• Have a somewhat clunky interface and don't permit to zoom in on some frame that we really like to look at.
• You sometimes have to jugle a bit to see the scans, as the fit of the pages in the screen is not always the best.
• Most of the time you have to deal with that annoying top and bottom frame and ocasionally some adds.
• It's hell if you don't have a high-speed connection, of course ^_^'

So lots of people prefer to have the scan files in their hard drive and look at it with a nice software program. Now, if that's your case, what to use???

ACdSee is currently, the best software out there to read mangas - or manage your photos, for that matter, if you happen to be a photographic fanatic!

This program not only has a great interface, permitting you to organize your manga scans, chapters and books anyway you want, with the help of nifty thumbnails, it also permits that you move from page to page using your spacebar or mouse scroll-down button (you choose).

Besides that, you can also zoom in on any detail of the manga at the click of a button to watch that fine detail that's hard to see.

And, if the manga scan isn't the best you can even try to improve it's quality with the built-in tools ACdSee Photo Manager has.

Well, that's great, but of course, this software is professional so it has a price tag atached. Anyway, if you want, give it a free trial, to see if you like it!

CDisplay is not so user-friendly as ACdSee but after half-an-hour you'll get the hang of it. This one has the advantage to be free and it does it's job rather well even if it has limited configuration options.

With a double-click you can use it to open the scanlations directly from the rar or zip archive and you then use the mouse wheel or specified key to scroll through the pages. It's automated sizing of the pages works great and is one of the plus of this software.

Perhaps the only downside to this program is the thumbnails view. It can become a little slow with big manga archives and the way it's done (interface, basically) does not help a lot when you want to skip chapters or find that page where you stopped reading last time.

Yep, that's right, there's a free manga reading software out there that some say it's better than CDisplay. I'm talking about MangaMeeya!

What makes it stand out from the crowd is the possibility for you to open archives within archives, directly from this program. Folks that download mangas online can understand how this is a fine assest. Also, the way it's designed makes for a very fast loading off all the thumbnails, with hardly no memory consumption and to boot it has a lot of costumazitions available to the end user.

The downside? Well, the full featured version is in Chinese! So if you understand this language, this is the manga viewer I recommend you. There's also an english version but it isn't half as featured. Still, if you feel somewhat limited by CDisplay, you can give it a go.

Of course, to read manga in your pc, you first need to download it from somewhere.

Sure, you can use torrents, peer-to-peer or even rapidhare kind of sites. But why not go directly to the sites that already host manga scanlations?

This is the time you shake your head and call me crazy, because any normal human being would go berserk from having to download one page at a time!

But now I answer! Not quite! There's a new software out there, from DomDomSoft. It's called Manga Dowloader and it's title says it all. This gives you the option to download manga scans from know sites like OneManga and MangaFox.

You can download several mangas at the same time, storing them in your computer for later viewing. There's a free version and a paid one. Essentially they are the same, the latter giving you more options to facilitate your work - having a queue system, an advanced filter and a bookmarking tool.