Ahh! I forget that it is possible to maximize the main app. This is actually not intended, but I've kept it for now since the UI for the app is pretty atrocious at this point. I need to spend a day at some point to make sure everything scales uniformly on resize..
I also noticed the tooltip bar on the bottom-right looking real bad, lol.
You play some visual novels, right? If you play any with fairly still backgrounds, I think you will like the new alpha update I'm dropping now.
It should make things a bit smoother looking, and it will save you translation requests if the text is continuously written out.
To use it, go to General tab and check the 'Still background' checkbox. There's also two new hotkeys, one that toggles it, and one that requests a new background in case the automatic background detection isn't updating correctly.
I've also added a 'Text removal expansion scale' user config to General tab. Increasing it will help to remove text that is too thick or in those cases that the OCR is struggling to detect the text box correctly. Decreasing should help make the text removal less destuctive.
Let me know if you try it! Thank youuu! :)
I'm trying to make VN's, Comic/Manga reading as smooth sailing as possible. Would love to know from anyone that often plays or reads these on their input. It's hard for me who only ever read physical comics and books to know what I can do to improve the user experience here.
Well, I do play one game that's similar to that, but I think it has more animations than the average Visual Novel, so I'm curious if that will cause any interference. I'll test it out when I play next to see how it performs, but either way, I think this will be a very useful feature.
The Text removal expansion scale looks really promising. That sounds like an excellent feature that will be a big help.
Outside of that one VN-like game, I'm not playing any other Visual Novels right now, but I do read manga frequently. I will certainly test them out sometime :)
Thanks so much for adding these features!
I ended up running a quick test, lol. I tried out the Still background feature, but when I hit the New still background button, the text doesn't translate, and this happens with both manga and games. It successfully updates the background image, but it keeps showing the translation from the previous image instead of the new one.
I do want to point out a positive side effect: the Still background feature actually eliminated the text displacement problem I was having in Stream friendly mode. At least when the feature is active, the text displays correctly. It's just a pity that the new text doesn't get translated.
Obviously, this doesn't fully solve my Stream friendly mode issue since it only works with the Still background function for manga or vn, but I definitely see this as progress in the right direction :)
Love it! This feedback is so important. I never expected feedback to be so rare, and I really can't tell if it's good or bad at this point, lol. I feel like I got way more feedback when I had wayyyy less users (and the app obviously being more broken and feature-less..).
Yes, this is actually a misunderstanding. Maybe my description of the function in-app is confusing.
So 'new background' literally only does just that, updates the background - not the text itself. The purpose of this hotkey is just to update the background when the automatic check fails. The 'One shot' hotkey should suffice for this, but thinking of it... pretty sure it is disabled when automatic capture is paused.. Might have to rethink that. Anyways - I have noticed the automatic background check isn't working very well, I'll have to keep tweaking that.
Also, I believe the reason to why your text isn't updating at all when new text shows is because there is something moving (even just one pixel) in your capture area. With Still Background activated, it literally has to be still. I will look into how I can improve this so that it works even if there are faint animations in the background.
That is super interesting information... When you tried this, were you running 0.5.4-alpha.1 or 0.5.4-alpha.2?
Edit:
Wait, hmm.. Are you absolutely certain that it starts misaligning like before when you unselect Still Background mode?
That's interesting 😂
Ah, now I get it, and that makes perfect sense :) It's probably not confusing at all; I must have misinterpreted it. My bad. 😔🙏🙏🙏
I was using version 0.5.4-alpha.2. Since I saw two available versions, I just downloaded the newest one right away.
I double-checked, and the result was the same. The fix only works when that specific feature is active; when it's off, the problem persists.
No worries 😎
Got it! I realize now why this 'solves' the problem for you.
So, what happens when activating the 'Still background' mode is that it renders the entire image back onto the screen, instead of just where the text exists. This disguises the misaligning problem. If I'm not missing something else, you should be able to see the background being a few pixels misaligned.
Another thing that I solved in alpha.2 is that centred text (e.g. comic text) used to have its starting X position decided by the median position of all text lines. This was added a long time ago to avoid text overflowing and disappearing due to slightly incorrect positioning occasionally for some text boxes. It is now redundant since I am now allowing text to render outside of the selected capture area. What happens now is that the entire text group selects the left-most X position. So, again, if I'm not mistaken, you should still see an improvement compared to the screenshots you uploaded a few weeks ago in another thread.
But.. we do still have a misalignment issue with Stream Friendly mode that needs to be addressed. I believe my other laptop had the same issue, so I'll look at it again before the week is over.
Thank you! ⭐⭐⭐
"If I'm not missing something else, you should be able to see the background being a few pixels misaligned." - Yes, that is correct.
Now, the only remaining issue with Stream friendly mode on my end is that misalignment issue. Previously, the only way I could fix it was by using that "Windows scaling workaround" I mentioned, which was too cumbersome and time-consuming. Fortunately, thanks to the new feature, I can now use the Still background button to mitigate this selection issue (for manga, for instance), which makes it much less annoying. I'm really glad that feature is available!
Thanks for all your help.
Just dropped v0.5.4-alpha.3
Still background is now really only meant to be used for visual novels. It still works for comics/manga but it will add extra processing time. I will sort out any misplacement issues soon I hope, I just need to spend time to actually attempt to fix it, lol.
The issues you had with no translations being done when using Still Background should now be fixed. I had also accidentally introduced a bug with the colour detections in one of the alpha versions. It is now also fixed.
And man, no need to thank me, you're the one doing me a great service!
Okay, so Stream friendly mode is finally working with Still background for both manga and games. I'm happy with this fix. While there's a small bit of extra processing time, it's not too bad and doesn't bother me, and it now translates the text when the image changes. It may be that Stream friendly mode only avoids misalignment when I use the Still Background feature, but even so, this is a great solution. I'm totally fine with this for now.
Unfortunately, this new update has introduced two bugs:
1. Manual capture mode only functions when Still background is active. If Still background is off, selecting text does nothing and no translation occurs.
2. In Automatic capture, if I hit Pause and try to select something new, the selection box is invisible, and it won't translate until I unpause. Also, the whole "translate while paused" thing only works if Still background is active, too. If it's off, no selection box, no translation. It didn't do this before; you could always select and translate while paused.
