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Comic Book RAR (CBR) to PDF converter

CBR → PDF opens the RAR archive in memory and lays the scans out one per page, which matters because phones, tablets and print shops open PDF but rarely RAR.

  • Converted with Image engine · input deleted within 24 h
  • Free: 5 conversions a day · 5 MB each
  • Higher limits →

From real runs

What you get — and what changes

  • RAR versions Kept

    Both generations opened: Planet Comics #35 is a RAR4 archive of 52 pages and The Travels of Timmy Toodles a RAR5 archive of 28.

  • Files with the wrong extension Kept

    We read the file signature, not the name. A Terrors of the Jungle #21 download called .cbz was really a RAR archive and converted like any CBR.

  • Reading order Kept

    That archive stored page 3 first and page 1 near the end; sorting by number put the cover first and the inside-cover advertisement second, as printed.

  • JPEG scans Kept

    The 52 Planet Comics scans went into the PDF without being decoded or recompressed, so each page holds exactly the pixels of the scan.

  • PNG scans Changed

    PNG pages stay lossless but are recompressed: Timmy Toodles took 18.8 s and its 40.1 MB of page images became a 32.3 MB PDF.

  • Page sizes Changed

    Pages are sized from their pixels at 150 DPI. Planet Comics has a 1024-pixel-wide cover and 800-pixel inside pages, so the cover page is wider than the rest.

  • Checksum and thumbnail files Lost

    The .SFV checksum list in the Terrors archive, Thumbs.db and similar files are not pages and are left out.

  • Password-protected or split archives Lost

    We cannot decrypt RAR files, and the first part of a split set (.part1.rar) would give missing pages, so both are refused with a message.

Sample conversions

RAR4 comic with JPEG pages

Input
Planet Comics #35 (Fiction House, 1945, public domain), an 18,571,883-byte RAR4 .cbr of 52 JPEG scans.
Output
19,460,543-byte PDF, 52 pages, in 0.9 s; scans embedded unchanged.

RAR5 picture book with PNG pages

Input
The Travels of Timmy Toodles by Johnny Gruelle (public domain), a 36,845,574-byte RAR5 .cbr of 28 PNG pages up to 2305 × 3246 pixels.
Output
32,333,664-byte PDF, 28 pages, in 18.8 s. Lossless, but slow because every PNG is recompressed.

RAR archive misnamed .cbz

Input
Terrors of the Jungle #21, a 15,190,198-byte RAR4 file with a .cbz name, 32 JPEGs stored out of order and an .SFV file.
Output
15,223,197-byte PDF, 32 pages in printed order, in 0.35 s.

A real Comic Book RAR (CBR) → PDF run

We converted our Comic Book RAR (CBR) sample (4.9 MB) with Image engine on 2026-10-20. It took 186 ms and produced a 4.9 MB PDF file, about the same size as the input. The engine raised no warnings.

Input · sample.cbr · 4.9 MB

5,092,885 bytes

Output · sample.pdf · 4.9 MB

PDF 1.7, 7 pages, no text layer, 7 image objects

Version
1.7
Pages
7
Images
7
Text layer
no

Options and when to change them

dpi
Raise it to 300 if the PDF is going to a printer and you want page sizes near a real comic.
width
Set a pixel width to shrink very large PNG or JPEG scans; resized pages are saved as JPEG.
quality
Sets the JPEG quality for resized and WebP pages; leave it at 90 unless the file must be small.
max_pages
Useful for checking the first pages of a large omnibus before converting all of it.

Do it yourself

bsdtar and img2pdf

bash
mkdir pages && bsdtar -xf comic.cbr -C pages && find pages -type f -iname '*.jpg' -print0 | sort -zV | xargs -0 img2pdf -o comic.pdf

bsdtar comes with libarchive and reads RAR4 and most RAR5 files but not encrypted ones. Extract into an empty folder, since an untrusted archive writes files to disk.

unar (The Unarchiver)

bash
unar -o pages comic.cbr

An alternative extractor; version 1.10.1 failed on a solid RAR5 test archive that bsdtar read, so check the page count afterwards.

Comic Book RAR (CBR) to PDF by API or MCP

The HTTP API and the MCP server run the exact engine this page uses (Image engine); the response carries the same warnings the web converter shows. Check support first with GET /api/v1/pairs?from=cbr&to=pdf.

curl
curl -X POST https://filetypeconverters.com/api/v1/convert \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $FTC_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@input.cbr" -F "from=cbr" -F "to=pdf" \
  -F 'options={"width":0}' \
  --output output.pdf

Options this engine accepts for Comic Book RAR (CBR) → PDF

KeyApplies toTypeDefault
widthWriting PDFnumber0
heightWriting PDFnumber0
fitWriting PDFcontain · cover · fillcontain
qualityWriting PDFnumber90
backgroundWriting PDFstring#ffffff
stripMetadataWriting PDFbooleantrue
API reference

When this is the wrong conversion

  • If your reader just refuses RAR, CBR → CBZ repacks the same pictures as ZIP, which every comic app opens.
  • If the archive asks for a password, remove it with the program that created it; we cannot open encrypted RAR files.
  • If the CBR is split into .part1, .part2 files, join them into one archive before converting.

Comic Book RAR (CBR) to PDF questions

What is the difference between CBR and CBZ?

Only the container. CBZ is a ZIP archive of page images and CBR is a RAR archive of the same kind of images. Many CBR files are really ZIPs and many CBZ files are really RARs; we check the signature and handle either.

Why was my CBR refused as damaged, split or password-protected?

Our archive reader cannot decrypt RAR files, and the first part of a split RAR set looks complete but has missing data. Both cases stop with a message instead of producing a PDF with blank or missing pages.

Why did a PNG comic take much longer than a JPEG one?

JPEG scans are copied into the PDF as they are. PNG pages have to be decoded and compressed again to stay lossless, about two thirds of a second per full-size page in our tests.

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