Suggestion to improve the double page reader

[ildemir]

As it is right now MD has my favorite reader from any manga site. But some improvement i would love to see is to the double page reader. Currently the double page reader acts in (as far as I can tell) this fashion;
page#1 goes to the right (or if your preferred orientation is left to right it goes to the left)
page#2 goes to the left
And it goes like so until the last page or if there is a double page it might adjust itself from then on to switch the orientation.

Now this system works OK for the most part but if the first page was supposed to be on the other side where it was published you get them in a weird fashion. While the pages are still in the same order the problem is that you may not be able to experience the narrative the author was trying to achieve.

Here is an example:
Manga title : Beastars
Chapter# : 131
If you are reading on the double page format and you haven't switched the ordering with

g, left, g, g

then you are on the wrong pairing. Which means you will get the page pairing 3to4 and 5to6. While it doesn't look weird on fist glance, you may realize the antler on page 4 is connected to the antler on page 5. This may also break the suspension designed by the author just like in page 11to12 where there is a character reveal.

How to fix this:
Simply put, I can't. I don't know enough about image recognition to tell you if it can be done but here is an idea nonetheless. Most manga designed to come out in a magazine have white parts where the magazine's middle is. IF you could detect these you could pair them together which should work on most manga.

Thank you guys for all your hard work as always and have a great day.

 

[Teasday]

@ildemir The double page not matching the initial position is a bit of a problem, agreed, but there's not many ways of getting around it. Image recognition is most definitely not going to be a reliable method. Remember that groups may add their own credits pages, stitched pages (sometimes both the stitched and unstitched versions), accidentally missing pages, and so on. Sometimes the images are cropped so that there is no white part for the fold anyway.

The same and similar issues prevent there from being a simple setting for whether the first page should be on the left or the right. The only reliable way that I can think of would be the uploader having to define the orientation of every single page, and that's not going to happen.

As a double mode user myself, I've tried to make it easy to correct the offset manually, though.

g, left, g, g

is definitely more complicated than what I had in mind. For one, you can select a specific page by clicking on the bottom page bar. You can also turn by a single page at a time in double page mode by one of these methods:
- Around the bottom right [Page x / y] space, click on the left/right arrows
- With mouse over the same space, scroll the mouse wheel (only if "Turn page by vertical scrolling" is enabled)
- Use the page turn keyboard shortcuts

shift + left/right/a/d

 

[ildemir]

@Teasday

- Use the page turn keyboard shortcuts

shift + left/right/a/d

Yo that's really convenient! I can't believe I missed that in the keyboard shortcuts section. After I wrote the post hastily I realized it was not going to work to just have an image recognition system since it's probably something complicated and not a %100 reliable. But me not being a very creative person I can't really think of any method that doesn't rely on humans and thus has a human error factor. Regardless thank you for the response and have a great day.

 

[theotherwaytoo]

The only reliable way that I can think of would be the uploader having to define the orientation of every single page, and that's not going to happen.

I don't understand why it has to be defined for every single page. Literally the only thing the uploader has to define is the orientation of the first page, that's all. You can either make it a rule to only include credit pages at the end, or just have the uploader take that into account.

This is a really fundamental feature of a manga reader. I'll grant you that it's a very common issue (like, mangaplus is absolutely TERRIBLE at ordering the pages in desktop view, to the point of even double-page-spreads being unreadable), but in a website like this, I don't see why the uploaders can't just assign a left or right starting order. I understand there are some manga that are uploaded in such a shitty way that there's no way of ordering it no matter what you do, but the majority of uploads would be solved by this one binary variable. The reader just needs to know where to start, and the rest is sorted.

I think you must be worried that if uploaders had to assign this value, inevitably a portion of uploaders (maybe a lot, maybe a few) are going to either get this wrong, or entirely ignore it. That's fine, have a left-first-page as the default order, and have a report function for when it's wrong. All it should take is a mod to click one button to fix it. There won't even be that many reports because evidently 99% of users don't give a shit about the pages being ordered right.

If there are a lot of reports or you just don't want a team of volunteer mods to manually fix it, then you can literally just delegate it to the community, by letting them mark the chapter as having the wrong order, and once enough people mark it, it'll change sides. Or just let the reader press a button to change the order on his own reader, and have the site default to the order most users end up choosing. There are so many solutions.

I genuinely see no reason for this to exist, you're acting like it's an insurmountable problem, but we're talking about just one single binary variable per chapter. It's significantly easier than even just typing the chapter's name or number from the uploader's perspective. The discussion of image recognition is insane to me, it's like developing a nuclear bomb to kill a fly. You just need one variable, that's all...

 

[Teasday]

_{@theotherwaytoo posted:}

I don't understand why it has to be defined for every single page. Literally the only thing the uploader has to define is the orientation of the first page, that's all. You can either make it a rule to only include credit pages at the end, or just have the uploader take that into account.

The reader just needs to know where to start, and the rest is sorted.

This is unfortunately not the case, as you can find especially with releases where the scanlators include relevant cover/color/spread pages from the magazine or they might exclude blank pages from the tankoubon scans and so on, all of which may throw the orientation off right in the middle of the release. A landscape-oriented credits page at the start gets recognized as a double page which would render the setting completely useless. Forcing people to move their credits pages to the end violates our intent to avoid interfering with the scanlators' releases and doesn't do anything to address the hundreds of thousands of chapters already on the site.

Would it work for a good chunk, possibly even the majority of the releases? It well might, but I did include the word "reliable" in there for a reason. Implementing a voting system you like suggested would involve much more data than a simple bit per chapter row. Admittedly I'm concerned that implementing the orientation flag and creating a report option for it might lead to people reporting floods of chapters that can't be fixed no matter which setting you pick (and I already feel bad for our moderators as it is), but on the other hand it would save us all a bit of headache most of the time we open a chapter.

 

[theotherwaytoo]

Alright, I understand the concerns, I was admittedly callous and disregarded the amount of chapters that just can't be fixed without really manually going into it. I apologize for being annoying about it.

But I still stand by a few of my points, and I want to maintain these options as suggestions:

1. The "single bit solution", just adding a flag for starting left or right. It shouldn't even be visible to the users, just a variable chosen by the uploaders and consulted by the reader. This is not a solution for all chapters, and a lot of uploaders will ignore it. I accept these faults, but I feel that it would be easy to implement, and a substantial chunk of chapters would be fixed by this.

2. Invisible vote system: no report button, no flag, just letting a user choose which side to start with. Possibly marking a box for "ignore first page", but even this would be extra. I guess your main concern with this is that it might increase the amount of reports substantially. The pros IMO are that a LOT of chapters would be solved just by letting the reader mark which page to start with, and the site can keep track of it. You say it's a lot of data, but is it significantly more data than keeping track of chapter views? We're talking just two numbers here, "number of users reading this as left orientated", "number of users reading this as right orientated", you just take this datapoint once at the end of the chapter, and then the site defaults to the higher number. You can even mark a point where there is enough data and the site stops keeping track of it.

If these options are still both not implementable, then I guess I agree there's no solution. I think the problem is that to most users it's a non-issue, and those who care about it can indeed just use solutions like shift+left, so I understand the desire to not devote any resources to it, I guess.

 

[Teasday]

_{@theotherwaytoo posted:}

2. Invisible vote system: no report button, no flag, just letting a user choose which side to start with. Possibly marking a box for "ignore first page", but even this would be extra. I guess your main concern with this is that it might increase the amount of reports substantially. The pros IMO are that a LOT of chapters would be solved just by letting the reader mark which page to start with, and the site can keep track of it. You say it's a lot of data, but is it significantly more data than keeping track of chapter views? We're talking just two numbers here, "number of users reading this as left orientated", "number of users reading this as right orientated", you just take this datapoint once at the end of the chapter, and then the site defaults to the higher number. You can even mark a point where there is enough data and the site stops keeping track of it.

If we were to store them as a couple of simple integers, sure. That's not necessarily what would happen though, since we shouldn't be counting the same user twice. It's one row per chapter per user and guests would be ignored. I believe the views are counted based on the caching the IP for 6 hours or something, and I suppose technically we could instead do that for the orientation data too, but at that point I think I'd honestly rather be using the simple flag method. Would be easier to rely on its accuracy too.

I really would love some kind of a solution for this, being a primary user of the double page mode myself, and to be frank I'm tempted to try the manual setting flag. It's just hard to predict how succesful it would actually be.