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It’s been a while, MangAI

It feels like I haven’t worked on MangAI in ages. While reading manga on my iPad last night, I noticed that some of the 2-page scans were being placed at the end of the chapter instead of in-between the proper pages. Tracing back through MangAI’s MSM interpretation, I found the cause of the problem. Here’s a sample scenario:

Foo_ch25/
Foo_25-01.jpg
Foo_25-02.jpg

Foo_25-10.jpg
Foo_25-1112.jpg
Foo_25-13.jpg

In this case, Foo_25-1112.jpg refers to chapter 25, pages 11-12. “25-1112” is tricky to interpret since MangAI has to first determine that the given hyphen does not refer to a span between 25 and 1112, and then it has to determine that 1112 is an unspecified span 11-12. The first step was already being handled properly, but the second step was never given a chance since the first step, after splitting 25 and 1112 into separate entities, disregarded 1112 as being too large of a number to refer to a volume, chapter, or page.

Confused yet? I was too. It’s a rare situation, but I am now working on improving the logic.

Categories: MangAI, Projects
  1. Andrew Mantel
    June 21st, 2012 at 15:30 | #1

    That wasn’t as difficult to implement as I thought it would be. I tried the new logic on all my test cases, and it ended up only being needed by one series :P Like I said before, it’s a rare case, but I’m glad to have it covered. It also allowed me to improve unspecified span detection in general.

    I will continue playing with the code. There is at least one other feature I want to investigate before releasing an update.

  2. Verix
    June 22nd, 2012 at 05:56 | #2

    I’ll soon be buying an ipad and will buy you application to do the resizing work, so I’d like to thank you for your continuous efforts towards improving the program. Keep up the good work.

  3. Andrew Mantel
    June 22nd, 2012 at 11:30 | #3

    Making some great logic improvements. I had blissfully forgotten how confusing this logic is to program. Right now I’m improving detection/handling of unspecified spans (1112 meaning 11-12) and hyphens not indicating spans (50-200 is probably something like chapter 50, page 200). After that, I want to try to improve parsing of non-delineated chapters (foo_v3_5-10 is probably volume 3, chapters 5-10).

    @Verix
    You are going to love manga on the iPad :3

  4. Andrew Mantel
    June 25th, 2012 at 15:04 | #4

    I’m happy with the new logic. I also updated the epub creator since I received feedback that MangAI epubs were not displaying well on Nook. As I don’t own a Nook, I’m not sure if these latest epub updates will have any effect. The only epub viewers I have available for testing are iBooks on my iPad and Calibre on my laptop, both of which display the new epubs perfectly. Hopefully they will view better on all devices. Note that if you have a choice of format, epub is the last one I would choose for manga as it is more suited for text than full screen images. My order of digital manga format preferences is:

    cbz/cbr/zip/rar > image folder > pdf > epub

    Will be testing for the next few days. If all is well, I expect the update to go live this weekend.

 

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