I want a manga reader that
All that is doable - except the OCR. Good luck. D:
Why not the OCR? There are Japanese OCRs out there.
I never tried them, tho.
Most manga scans you'll find will have nowhere near enough resolution for today's OCRs to work with, I suspect.
Also, did you try my manga reader? Your first point assumes you'd be showing one picture at a time, and I think that's the wrong way to go for a manga reader. I find my own approach to this much more natural.
No I didnt try your reader yet.
Does it combine all pics in one page like that other manga reader? I would hate that. I like to see one page at a time.
On the contrary of an all-in-one, I would prefer a reader that splits even more, like top of the page as one pic, bottom as another pic. If a scan has two pages, split it in two or more.
Anything but scrolling.
It combines in various ways, but try it out. It's designed for comfortable reading, and I'd love any comments on why it might not work.
Ok, downloaded.
First thing that comes in mind: need more advance buffering in the background, like 2-3 pages ahead at least. I would only display the pages when there is enough to fill the monitor screen. Those pages blinking into view take some time to get used to, if ever.
No zoom? No Actual_Size/Fit_All keyboard switch while fullscreen? No adjustable gamma while fullscreen? Sorry but that makes it useless for me as a reader. ^^;
I get random shearing [pixels-wide ripples] when I move the screen but that may be my video card? Testing with ACDSee.. nope no shearing with ACDC.
It's interesting in windowed mode, because it shows the manga like a movie strip. Not sure I would have a practical use of this... ah yeah sometimes they are manga pages that are split over two scans. It's an interesting concept, it would be nice if ACDC could put together 2 related scans.
The pre-buffering is something I'd want, but I've been too lazy to code it. Zoom is a pain in the ass to implement, and I've never used it for reading, only for translating. Maybe I should add some keyboard shortcuts, though. Usually I just hit return to quickly switch in and out of fullscreen when adjusting things, but normally I just set things up the way I want at first and then read.
A lot of that is just because it's designed to be a reader and not an image viewer. It's not meant for careful inspection of individual pages, it's meant for reading a continous story without interruptions. If I'm quickly previewing a comic, or carefully studying it, or translating, I use ACDSee. If I want to sit down and read something, I use mangariini. The ideal for me would be to get it running on a portable device with a high enough resolution screen, preferrably touch sensitive for easy scrolling. A tablet PC would probably be ideal, but those are a bit expensive to get just for reading manga.
Sometimes I need an unzoomed mode because the kanji are too small, that's why. Or there's a detail that is part of the story.
Problem with ACD, one needs to hit two keys, Ctrl+-. I have been sticking with ACD 3.1 because the later versions had become huge monsters, so I don't know if they added customizable keys.
Some scans are too dark so I need a gamma. ACD needs multiple keys to arrive to the gamma - a direct key would have been nice.
And yeah, I mean reading only.
For translation then the zoom becomes mandatory, not just see_all/unzoomed. I also have Notepad open at the same time, moving back and forth from acd to notepad. Well those two, and also the IME Pad and JWPce and Firefox/Babelfish and also a DOS box with Kakasi open [romaji converter that only works under DOS]. It quickly adds to a lot of windows.
CDisplay, trying now...
Zoom is weird, it's either all/zoomed or a fixed-zoom moveable magnifying glass. +/- doesn't do anything. Needs two keys to do "zoom".
Ctrl-F [see all] gives a grey-white flash before the pic appears. It flashes also when using the gamma. That ruins it for me.
ACDSee is faster - with CDisplay I have the time to see the hourglass while scanning thru a series of images.
"Japanese Mode" is a nice touch.
"Display Two Pages" is nice but there should be an option to adjust the center gap - most scans are two short, or overlap.
try infran view
ComicsViewer > all other comic reader software
http://www.comicer.com/stronghorse/software/index.htm#ComicsViewer
Mine's still better. ComicsViewer apparently just has a million features I'd never use, but lacks the things I want, like side-by-side pages and a comfortable interface.
...there's a reason behind the side-by-side pages other than the 'neatness' of it? I found it rather pointless and impractical myself... maybe that's just me, though.
Not sure what you mean by it lacking a comfortable interface, though. It's just menubar - toolbar - image - statusbar. Much like any image viewing program, including yours. The mousecontrols for navigation seem pretty intuitive to me as well.
As for the 'million features'... well, I suppose a bunch of them are pretty useless nowadays, but back in the ol' days (think Dual Translations scanlating Love Hina), when the concept of "touching up manga pages because they're crappy Chinese scans" was still foreign, being able to change things like contrast and brightness without changing the actual file and without having to repeat doing the same thing over and over again for each file was a godsend.
Side-by-side pages give a better flow. You don't have to flip back and forth between individual pages, but get to see them in more of a context. It's less disruptive to the reading to smoothly scroll from page to page than to switch between pages. And for those scans that don't have joined page spreads, you get that for free too.
And that's a big part of what I find comfortable. The other things are related, such as several intuitive ways of scrolling the pages.
Now, if I wanted a program that only showed individual pages, I would, and do, use ACDSee. As you say, most of the features in that are in ComicsViewer and not in ACDSee are not very relevant these days.
>Side-by-side pages give a better flow. You don't have to flip back and forth between individual pages, but get to see them in more of a context.
Exactly how would seeing half of the previous page (still fresh in memory) and half of the next page (potential spoilers) present more of a context?
>And for those scans that don't have joined page spreads, you get that for free too.
Split pages when they should be joined is as rare (if not, more) as pages that aren't touched up. Heck, I've seen pages that are joined when they should be split happen more often.
>Now, if I wanted a program that only showed individual pages, I would, and do, use ACDSee. As you say, most of the features in that are in ComicsViewer and not in ACDSee are not very relevant these days.
...except that ACDSee assumes that the page begins at the upperleft corner instead of the upperright corner, can't split images (well... it can, but not in the same way), has even more features you'd never use, is bloated and costs money.
> Exactly how would seeing half of the previous page (still fresh in memory) and half of the next page (potential spoilers) present more of a context?
The point is the single spatial context as opposed to the individual contexts of single images. "Seeing half the previous page" just misrepresents the idea.
Ah, but books aren't single spatial contexts. They're collections of 2-page contexts. Also, the author assumes you are reading from a 2-page context and adapts the style of storytelling based on that.
Yes, the most elegant would be to do two-page spreads, and maybe lay these out on top of each other, but this is impossible in practice due to skipped pages, mis-numbered pages, and joined pages... So keeping them all next to each other is the next best thing.
In a one-page context, the effect of the author using storytelling and timing based on a two-page context is still there. In a continuous scroll of pages, however, the effect is lost; for example, there aren't any sudden surprises after 'turning the page' anymore, because, well, you've already seen half of the next page. Misinterpreting the idea or not, that is what happens.
If I can struggle through wxMac's terrible build setup and millions of pointless ./configure options, I'll make an OS X build.
>>22
My hero <3
I tried and got as far as compiling mangariini, but it wouldn't actually link. Turns out I accidentally downloaded a beta wxMac, though, so I'll try again later with a stable version.
No one knew I was here
I see you
Comicviewer does support side-by-side or 2-page view
Check out the toolbar, merged page is 2-page view, split page is 1-page view
It depends, most often I would read 1-page view as it's much more clearer in my 17" monitor. Iff you have a big monitor with 1280 resolution up, 2 page view may be better.
It's windows explorer right-click integration is the most comfortable interface for me, 2 clicks & read.
Zooming: Ctrl+H to fit height, ctrl+I to fit width.
For ACDSee users, download the ACDSee hotkey re-map, then you can use ACDSee's hotkey settings to read the next page or preview page. Direction arrows to move around.
Unfortunately I can't find any tool that can do OCR or even translate the text inside the digital image for Sling
Other Japanese comic viewers: http://www.geocities.jp/comicview7/
It has its own thread somewhere in here. Anyway, here you go: http://mangariini.skizzers.org/
the thread is http://4-ch.net/manga/kareha.pl/1100296167/
Waha didn't update his page yet, the most current version is 2.0-beta1. The sources can be downloaded here: http://membres.lycos.fr/madleser/coding/mangariini-0.2.0-beta1.tar.gz
It will remain like that until I find the motivation to fix a few (deep?) bugs and implement some convenience features.
It's not actually my page, even. I've been busy with a lot of other things, and I can't seem to get Mangariini and wxWidgets to work very well on Mac OS, so I haven't had much enthusiasm for working on it. I might leave it up to others, and add some of the functionality to future version of Xee instead.
Here's an request:
Is there a manga reader than can handle both the bare files in an archive, and files in a single folder in an archive? It's really annoying how I have to unzip the thing when they use Windows automatic zipping.
>>34
Try CDisplay, which is what people usually use for .cbz and .cbr files (just relabelled zip and rar, respectively). It has a "Japanese Mode" in the options menu, which sets two pages side by side with the first one on the right hand side. It lets you view the files right from the archive, and if I'm reading you right, should be about what you're looking for.
While I have no problem using IRfanview for manga reading, were I to use a different one, it would definitly be CDisplay.
The main reason I never got around to implementing archive support in Mangariini is because I never saw the point. Why would you want to obsessively keep all your comics in archives? Why not just unpack them once and have it over with, and then you can use the files for anything without having to seek out special software?
Why would you want to obsessively keep all your comics? I delete them.
Actually, I keep YKK, because it will never get licensed...
>>36
I think some people like to keep their archives because historically that has been easier when you wanted to share a file that's already been shared before and could then be shared by the other people with the same file simultanously, so the initial speed would be higher.
archive is easier to back up and handle
need to store before I read as there are too many coming up every day
Why is it harder to backup a directory than an archive? I can't see any situation where that would be the case.
the number of files
the directory listing
you will see the difference if you move them or delete them
or if you open a folder containing 100+ images
This isn't the eighties any longer. I can have thousands of files in directories, and my computer won't break a sweat. I really don't see your point.
Actually, I wish people would torrent the folders rather than the zips, because then they wouldn't use Windows archiving and automatically create the damn folder.
> Copying and deleting are slower.
Is that really an issue? We're talking seconds here, performed every one in a blue moon.
> Sharing is harder.
Granted, but that doesn't seem a big issue for most people either.
> Is that really an issue? We're talking seconds here, performed every one in a blue moon.
sorry I'm only using IDE HDD not Raptor or high speed SATA
Moving thousands of files takes a few more seconds
Opening a folder with thousand of images takes even longer. And if you do back up them and if you are loading them in CD-ROM or DVD you will notice how long it takes to open a folder of thousands of files.
Yes it's computer era and seconds do mean a lot of time. I want every thing in my PC be done in the shortest effective time
Torrenting is also a problem, thousand of files create a much bigger torrent file which would be a bandwidth problem for some torrenting sites.
If you use irc or some other p2p, leeching picture by picture would drive you and the fserve crazy.
I've never had a problem opening folders of thousands of files on any hardware, not since 1997 or so. And it's not like you would open directories of thousands of files - you'd still use subdirectories for volumes or chapters.
And somehow I don't think you're torrenting all your files all the time. When you need to torrent, you can create an archive. There's no need to obsessively keep everything archived all the time.
I hate it when people archive and torrent data that can't be compressed anyway.
Sometimes I don't want to leech the entire thing, I just want a file or two. But nooooo, I have to waste 30-300MB just to get maybe ~500KB. Righto~!
Tip for torrent creators: don't torrent archives of images, unless you're doing something unusual like BMP + 7zip. Thanks.
>I've never had a problem opening folders of thousands of files on any hardware, not since 1997 or so. And it's not like you would open directories of thousands of files - you'd still use subdirectories for volumes or chapters.
Well, my problem is not your problem then. May be my hardware belongs to ancient years. Even opening a folder 50 images in the stupid winXP's default thumbnail mode create unnecessary caching in my HDD. Deleting thousands of files can take me up to 1 minute, depending on how I delete it.
I don't torrent all my files but I do share them back nearly 1:1 ratio by other means. I don't like BT. btw most of the mangas are archived when they are share, I don't really need to archive them again unless for adding recovery info. Yes, I'm obsessive to keep my storage safe and tidy.
>Sometimes I don't want to leech the entire thing, I just want a file or two. But nooooo, I have to waste 30-300MB just to get maybe ~500KB. Righto~!
500KB... you are getting one page from a manga I suppose? But that's not a common approach to get just one random page anyway. Usually manga are archived in volumes and it would rarely takes up to 300mb per archive.
Archiving option varies, archiving 20 volumes into 1 piece is not really recommended. But sometimes it has it's own reason, particularly for p2p network I guess.
Well, archive or not it's just personal choice. I don't think I really need to convince other people to archive them. But I'm just sharing my reasons of doing so.