Allow panels to be defined and browsed

[AntaeusFeldspar]

I think this reading mode is actually fairly common in digital comics apps. Anyone who's borrowed and read a comic in the "Hoopla" app, for instance, should find it familiar. Instead of having one entire page displayed each time, this mode lets you read a panel at a time, which is often much better on mobile devices. (Newly important to me after having a desktop go belly up.)

Of course, preparing a work to be read in this mode requires that for each page, someone goes through and identifies the rectangular sub-region of the page that contains each panel. Such "panelization" could easily be crowd-sourced, though, similar to the way Danbooru crowd-sources "notes" that are associated with specific areas of an image.

 

[Oeconomist]

I quite understand the desire for this feature. Often, reading is really awkward because a page doesn't fit well in the display, yet one needs to have seen the whole page to infer the panel order. Yet I don't see much easy about implementation of the proposal.

While it's possible to define rectangular regions containing any given manga panel, the panels are quite often not themselves rectangles, and I seven foresee battles over when to treat elements as panels or as panes within panels. Consider this page from Ano Ko ni Kiss to Shirayuri wo.

And I promise you that there would be trolling in the process.

 

[AntaeusFeldspar]

Well, obviously layouts that are all rectangular panels are easier to deal with, but the platforms which already implement this mode seem to do okay with the imperfect solution of "use the smallest rectangle which fully encloses the pane in question, even if it also captures pieces of other panes too."

Trolling, of course, will always be an issue that needs to be solved in any endeavor where people are given any sort of freedom. Since data storage requirements for a panelization would be so incredibly small, though, I think one possible solution is just to allow anyone who can create an account to define a panelization for a chapter. No one can edit someone else's panelization, but anyone can copy an existing panelization and use it as a base, if they think they can improve on some part of it. Users who consistently produce bad panelizations would largely just have their panelizations ignored. I think there's much less potential for trolling with this feature than there is in having comment sections, and since the site seems to do fine with comment sections...

 

[Teasday]

Admittedly kind of an interesting idea, but it does feel like our time would be better spent somehow improving the zooming capabilities on mobile rather than creating the entire infrastructure to support this and to rely on the community to keep it viable.

 

[AntaeusFeldspar]

It's true that improved zooming would pretty much solve the same problems.

Has anyone proposed such zooming? I looked on the sticky but I don't remember seeing it.

 

[Teasday]

Well, regular browser native pinch-zooming already works, it's just oddly awkward sometimes with the changing screen proportions causing the image to jump around and stuff.

 

[AntaeusFeldspar]

Huh.

I actually thought pinch-zooming didn't work. I just re-tried it, and on the third or fourth try, it worked.

... Maybe my touch screen doesn't like my fingers?

 

[war-ble]

To avoid trolls: if this is considered, I recommend crowdsourcing to find a large team of trusted people to define panels for each demographic rather than crowdsourcing from the entire userbase. A set of ground rules should be put down in general so the definition is consistent and guidelines for non-90 degree panels should also be considered.