Confirmed live: re-ingesting c't KI Wissen 2026 with a local Qwen VL
engine, page 18's chart transcription degenerated into "das Produkt,
das Produkt, das Produkt, ..." repeated hundreds of times, filling the
whole response budget -- and was accepted as real region text, which
would have been narrated verbatim.
The codebase already had two narrow signatures for specific observed
failures (a formatting-instruction echo, a fabricated LaTeX loop), both
scoped to the plain-text fallback path only. Added a general detector
(_looks_like_repetition_loop): any short phrase containing a real word,
repeated 8+ times immediately back-to-back. Deliberately excludes
patterns with no letters -- a dot-leader contents line, a repeated
number sequence -- which are legitimate and must not be flagged.
Applied at both call sites: vision_ocr_page (the labelled-region path
most engines use) and _whole_page_region (the plain-text fallback).
Treated as a failed call in both, so vision_ocr_page_chain's existing
fallback (secondary engine, then tesseract) gets a real chance instead
of garbage being accepted as the page's transcription.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Real failures found by re-inspecting a fresh re-ingest of c't KI Wissen
2026 after the previous figure-boundary-snapping release: a bar chart
was still truncated to roughly a third of its real height, and a
chart's top edge cut into an unrelated paragraph above it.
Root causes, each independently confirmed against the real page render
before fixing:
- A bar chart's bars/gridlines/axis labels rarely reach the "solid
ink" density a photo does (measured 0.25-0.5 vs the 0.55 threshold),
so the existing pass anchored only on the one fully-solid element
(the zero-line) and never grew further. Added a second, looser pass
that grows an anchor -- or the seed itself -- through any real mark
at all, fenced by the same blocked cells.
- Anchor selection ("which solid component does the seed overlap
most") was seed-size-dependent: a small seed touching only the
zero-line anchored there, but re-running the SAME function on the
box it had just produced -- now large enough to also touch a dense
axis-label strip -- picked that instead and shrank an already-good
box back down. Fixed by dilating the solid mask and labelling once,
BEFORE any seed is considered, so which components count as one
figure is a property of the page alone.
- A merged bounding box can enclose real text sitting between two
components even though neither component's own cells touched it (a
rectangle union, not the components' actual shape). Added
_trim_blocked_edges() to pull each edge back to the nearest text
wall found searching outward from the box's own centre.
- Two adjacent figures fencing each other's growth made each one's
result depend on the other's CURRENT box -- for two dark photos
sharing a caption strip, this never settled, swinging by over 100pt
call after call. snap_visual_bboxes() now re-seeds every visual on a
page from every other's last result for a bounded number of rounds,
deciding same-graphic ambiguity once up front (fenced against the
original seeds, before any iteration) so two disputed seeds can't
mutually fence each other into a tidy-looking split instead of being
recognised as the same disputed claim.
- A result is now only accepted once it reproduces itself when fed
back through the same rules (IoU-checked), and the minimum
seed/graphic overlap for repositioning a badly-offset box was
lowered slightly -- it was narrowly rejecting some real cases.
Verified against the full 204-page/147-figure document: idempotency
holds except for one confirmed non-convergent pair, which now lands on
the same deterministic answer every run instead of continuing to
drift.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Resumes an in-progress, uncommitted change from a previous session: the
live "page image + recognised text" preview shown during ingestion was
reworked to render formatted HTML (styled headings, a figure
placeholder) instead of a plain-text dump, but was left with a
duplication bug, dead code, inline styles, and no tests.
- Fixed duplication: a figure block's own transcribed text (usually its
on-screen UI copy) was rendered as an ordinary paragraph in addition
to the new figure placeholder box. Figure/chart/table/code blocks are
now represented only by the placeholder.
- Furniture/sidebar/pullquote/ad text is shown muted instead of being
dropped with no replacement, and is never promoted to a heading
regardless of font size.
- Factored the formatting logic out of the progress closure into a
standalone, unit-tested _render_ingest_preview_html().
- Replaced dead getattr(bbox, "y0", ...) calls (bbox is always a plain
[x, y, w, h] list) with direct indexing, moved statistics/logging
imports to module level, switched manual character replacement to
html.escape(), and bounded the preview by an accumulated line budget
instead of a blind slice that could truncate mid-tag.
- Replaced inline style="..." with CSS classes matching the panel's
existing dark console treatment.
- The frontend now always uses innerHTML (every text node is escaped
server-side), dropping the startsWith('<') content-type sniffing.
- Marked the preview panel aria-hidden -- decorative, and would
otherwise churn noisily for screen reader users on top of the
adjacent progress bar.
Verified against the real c't KI Wissen 2026 layout: a figure's raw
OCR text no longer appears twice, a real headline renders as <h3>, a
footer/pull-quote render muted, and all text is correctly escaped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A vision OCR engine grounds a figure far less precisely than it
transcribes one. Over all 138 figure regions of a 204-page issue the
transcribed contents were right while the boxes were routinely offset,
undersized, or sitting on the neighbouring text column -- page 23's card
grid was reported at x 0.24-0.54 where the graphic runs 0.41-0.95.
snap_visual_bboxes() reduces the page render to an ink-coverage grid,
seeds a connected-component search with the engine's box, and re-joins
tiles a gutter apart so a card grid comes back as one figure. Text
blocks are excluded from the mask, which is what stops a figure
swallowing the column beside it. A candidate must be solidly inked or
framed on nearly all of its rows and columns (admitting a white-interior
screenshot), may not shrink below 30% of the seed, and reverts when two
figures land on the same graphic; anything else keeps the box it had.
Runs before the figure crop in both OCR paths, so the images shown
during playback are framed correctly too. Replaces refine_picture_
bounds(), which only recognised coloured panels and had no text fence.
Also adds "Fix figure boundaries" in review and POST
/api/magazine/{id}/figures/refine behind it, so an issue ingested before
this pass can be corrected without re-running OCR. Verified live against
c't KI Wissen 2026: 78 of 138 boxes corrected, the rest declined.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ingestion now streams each page's image and recognised text into a
console-styled preview panel (Baidu Unlimited-OCR demo style) as pages
finish, instead of a bare progress bar -- raw text is written to a
per-job ingest_preview.json file since the background-job result field
strips text-like keys for data minimization.
Split-screen review boxes and their matching list rows now show a
centred icon for the region's kind and, when a region on a shared page
belongs to a different article, a badge naming that article, so a
claimed region is never mistaken for unclaimed text.
Added a "Draw it" mode: click-drag a box directly on the page image to
add a region the layout engine missed, as typed/OCRed text or as a new
figure (add_manual_region, POST /api/magazine/{doc_id}/pages/{page}/regions).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Split-screen review: the rendered page (left) with a numbered box per
detected block, the extracted text (right) with matching numbers.
Clicking either side highlights the other. Checkboxes moved from a flat
list into this layout without changing their semantics (still gate
what gets narrated).
"OCR again": reocr_page() forces one page through the configured
vision engine again, replacing only that page's blocks -- deliberately
does NOT call build_articles(), so an already-approved article is not
silently re-grouped. A magazine-level option re-reads every page and
re-runs detection (with a confirmation, since that does reset article
status). extract_pages() gained force_vision_ocr to skip its quality
gate for this case.
Building the numbered-box review immediately did what it was built to
do -- surfaced a real bug on live production data (real magazine, real
scan, not a synthetic fixture): a photo caption at 49.9% of the page
width sat in the gutter between two genuinely separate columns and
merged them into one, so every block on the page came back column=0
and reading order fell back to pure top-to-bottom, interleaving the
two columns' sentences. Fixed two compounding causes: column boundary
detection now excludes blocks much wider than the page's median width,
and detect_columns' gutter threshold (3.5%) was itself narrower than
some real magazine gutters (~2.1% measured) -- lowered to 1.5%.
10 new/updated tests, including one built directly from the real
measured page-17 block coordinates that exposed the bug.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Magazine P1:
- Images shown automatically during playback (assign_images_to_articles
links each figure to the article whose column it falls in; the client
shows the last image reached in reading order as playback advances).
- "Play all articles" queues every approved article and advances
automatically at the end of each rather than stopping.
- Word-level highlighting, explicitly documented as an ESTIMATE (no
forced-alignment/timestamp source exists): each word's share of the
sentence's real measured audio duration is proportional to its
character length. A checkbox turns it off; sentence highlighting
(measured, not estimated) is unaffected.
- Driving mode: full-screen overlay, two oversized controls, reuses
whatever is already playing/queued.
- Sidebars/pull-out boxes excluded from narration automatically
(mark_sidebars: an anomalously narrow column vs. the page's regular
grid). Fixed a real defect found while building this: a full-width
headline was left in the column-width analysis and could bridge two
genuinely separate columns into one, hiding a real sidebar column
entirely -- caught by a failing test before the fix.
Second OCR engine + fallback ladder:
- KDL Frontier Parser nano wired in via vision_ocr_page_chain (ordered
engine list, first usable result wins, tesseract last resort).
Confirmed live: ~3x faster than Baidu (~12s vs ~40s/page) but returns
plain text with NO coordinate markers, unlike Baidu's labeled regions.
_whole_page_region treats the whole response as one ambiguous
full-page block (gated by ocr_quality_score) rather than discarding
usable text just because it lacks layout structure.
OCR engines page + a real UI bug:
- The OCR & Document Parsing page had no .s-engines-page[data-page="ocr"]
markup at all -- renderLocalContainers already supported an OCR grid
generically, but $('dc-grid-ocr') was always null, so the card grid
silently never rendered. Added an Active OCR Engine panel mirroring
Active Language Model exactly, plus the Local grid -- both configured
engines now appear as ready-made cards, no "Add Custom" dialog needed.
- Fixed the audiobook pipeline's "Previous/Next" nav bar bleeding into
every .section-head in the document (confirmed live on the Engines
page: a "Cast Audiobook" button and "STEP 1/8" hint that made no sense
there). Changed from a blocklist (naming each unrelated section as
noticed) to an allowlist of the pipeline's three actual destinations.
Verified live end-to-end: play-all queue building and manual advance,
word-span markup, driving-mode toggle, OCR page showing both engines as
local cards, zero stray nav bars on the Engines page, no console errors.
20 new backend tests (156 total in the magazine module).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A page needing OCR (or whose already-extracted text -- native or
tesseract alike -- scores as mostly garbage via ocr_quality_score) is
now escalated to a connected vision OCR engine before falling back to
tesseract. Falls back automatically on any failure (unreachable engine,
timeout, unparseable output); never fatal to ingestion.
Verified live against ocr-baidu-unlimited-ocr on a real 28-page scanned
c't magazine excerpt (Epson ES-580W, no scanner OCR): every garbled
article title tesseract produced ("K | soll Arbeit abnehmen", ". |",
"@)X", "Owns mee") was replaced by the real headline ("1. Irrtum: KI
ist ein allgemeiner Jobkiller", etc.), and furniture detection jumped
from 44 to 151 blocks because the engine labels running headers/
footers/page numbers directly instead of needing fuzzy post-hoc
matching. 26 of 28 pages used the vision path; the remaining 2 fell
back to tesseract automatically.
Also fixes two real defects found investigating the same real-world
data, both regression-tested against the actual garbled strings
observed:
- Exact-match repeated-line detection (running header/footer) silently
failed once tesseract OCR'd the same line differently each time --
cluster_running_furniture fuzzy-matches near-edge blocks instead.
- ocr_page() built one Block per OCR text-LINE rather than per
paragraph, so a single anomalous line (a chart number, scan noise, a
wrapped headline continuation) could independently trigger title
classification -- now grouped by paragraph like the native PyMuPDF
path, using the paragraph's median line height rather than its total
bbox height for font size.
A vision-engine label (footer/title/page_number/caption) is trusted
outright and skips classify_blocks' font-size heuristics entirely,
since the engine gives no reliable font metric; an ambiguous "text"
region gets a synthesized estimate from its paragraph area and length
(estimate_font_size_from_area) and still goes through normal
classification.
Off unless vision_ocr_url/vision_ocr_model are configured
(vision_ocr_enabled setting, default on if reachable); per-request
override via the ingest endpoint body. Default engine URL uses
host.docker.internal, confirmed live -- the OCR container runs on its
own Docker network, not dgx_net, so a container-name default would not
resolve from the app container.
28 new tests (136 total in the module). ocr_quality_score is
deliberately coarse and documented as such: it catches text that is
mostly symbol noise, not a plausible single-word misread inside an
otherwise normal sentence (confirmed live: a misread "KI" -> "K |"
still scored 0.81) -- that class of error needs a dictionary or
language-model check, out of scope here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Studio -> Magazines: library, contents tree grouped by section with
confidence/pages/listening-time/audio status, the Stage D review
screen (tick/untick layout blocks, correct title/author, approve or
reject), a reflowed article view with click-to-seek sentence
highlighting, a linked original-page view showing the source bounding
box, and a podcast panel (2-3 host pickers, script generation,
turn-by-turn playback).
Wired into the existing lazy-module system (module-manifest.json,
loader.js, nav.js) rather than a separate app. Reuses /api/tts-preview
for both narration and podcast turns -- no new audio pipeline.
Fixes found building this:
- The pane toggle used role="tab" without the full ARIA tabs pattern
(aria-selected, roving tabindex, arrow-key nav) -- fails WCAG 2.2 AA
and hid the buttons from role-based tooling. Replaced with a button
group + aria-pressed, matching the plain-click interaction it
actually has.
- Print layout cues ("(continued on page 8)") were being sent to TTS
verbatim -- narration would have spoken the parenthetical aloud.
Stripped from the narration copy only; layout.json keeps the
original for the review screen.
- has_podcast now comes from the articles listing so opening an
article without a generated script skips a doomed GET instead of a
routine 404 on every open.
Verified against the real API contract with Playwright (library,
review pre-selection, approval, sentence highlighting + PDF-page
linking, podcast approval gate, zero console errors across the flow)
and manually end-to-end against a real ingested fixture, screenshots
included. Full suite: 94 Python tests, 33/34 desktop Playwright tests
(one unrelated pre-existing flaky DOM-count assertion).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Magazines break the audiobook pipeline's assumptions: several unrelated
articles share a page, columns run in parallel, adverts and sidebars
interrupt body copy, and a feature routinely jumps twenty pages to its
tail. Narrating page-by-page walks out of an article mid-sentence and
into an advert, so the canonical object is the article, not the page.
core/magazine.py reconstructs articles from a flat PDF: PyMuPDF extracts
blocks with bboxes and font metrics, tesseract supplies a TSV fallback so
scanned pages join the same column grouping, blocks are classified and
ordered column-major, and articles are anchored by the parsed table of
contents with "continued on page N" tails linked back.
routes/magazine.py adds 13 endpoints. Ingestion is a restart-safe
background job. Nothing is narrated until a human approves the
boundaries; podcast generation refuses unapproved articles.
Podcast mode renders an approved article as a 2-3 host discussion using
the configured LLM and voices the user picks, alongside narration rather
than instead of it.
Verified end-to-end over HTTP on a synthetic 8-page issue: the feature
came back as pages [3, 8] with its jump tail absorbed and the advert page
excluded, and an image-only rendering recovered all 47 blocks via OCR.
44 new tests; full suite 90 passing.
The Studio UI is not built — this is reachable only via the API.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The emotion quick-pickers added in 1.20.5 guarded with
`typeof REH_EMOTIONS === 'undefined'`, but REH_EMOTIONS is a const declared
later in the bundle's single shared scope — `typeof` on a const in its
temporal dead zone throws instead of returning "undefined", which aborted
top-level initialization for every module bundled after tts-preview.js.
The pickers now read window.REH_EMOTIONS on a deferred macrotask.
Also: emotion instructions are now always built in English (spoken text and
the native-accent clause stay in the book's language), which controlled A/B
testing showed produces a far cleaner prosodic gradient from Qwen3-TTS; and
Fish-Speech now receives temperature/top_p/repetition_penalty, which it was
the only backend never to have forwarded.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fish-Speech emotion tags were silently ignored on non-English books: per-line
emotions are LLM-generated in the book's own language, but Fish-Speech only
recognizes English [tag] markers, and a double-tagging bug was stacking a
broken server-derived tag on top of the client's own. Added a DE->EN
translation table and removed the double-tagging. Also wires the existing
book-profile context and race_species field into character portrait prompts
(previously only used for voice design), adds a recast-until-threshold loop
for casting, and adds backend-aware emotion quick-picks to Read Aloud, Try a
Voice, and Conversation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Voice consistency:
- Read back each voice's pinned seed (Seed Finder / Batch Seeds) on every
generation. The seed was saved to voice metadata but only ever read by the
Seed Finder's own benchmark path, so all per-voice seed pinning was inert.
- Stop coercing the "voice_design_playback" stability profile back to
"voice_clone". The pseudo-backend key isn't a real routing target, so the
backend-name normalizer silently rewrote it — reintroducing the hardcoded
seed:0 that profile exists to avoid, overriding every per-voice pin.
- Apply the accent clause on every line, not just at voice-creation time,
and reorder the instruct so emotion leads and accent trails (Qwen3-TTS
doesn't reliably follow multiple conflicting instructions).
- Pass an explicit language to Voice Design instead of leaving it on "Auto".
Audio effects:
- Add a limiter after compressor makeup gain. Makeup gain pushed peaks to
~1.9, and the final hard clip turned that into broadband distortion that
swamped the rest of the chain.
- Cascade highpass/lowpass 3 stages each (~18 dB/octave). Single-pole
filters were too gentle to band-limit speech audibly.
- Add a Bandpass control and wire it into the Telephone/Radio presets —
compression alone never sounded like a phone; band-limiting is the
defining trait.
Persona / Try It Out:
- Disable "Apply character persona" with an explanatory tooltip when the
voice has no persona saved, and error clearly server-side instead of
silently no-op'ing. Persona is typed manually per voice, never auto-filled.
- Stop dropping applyPersona in the chunked generation path (>200 chars).
- Populate the Voice Design dropdown from the user's own library rather than
filtering the engine's discovery list, which never contains custom voices.
Navigation and library:
- Use pushState instead of replaceState so browser Back/Forward step through
in-app navigation instead of leaving the app entirely.
- Show real dialogue line counts in the character sidebar instead of the
capped reference-quote count (which showed a misleading uniform "12").
Also fixes a crash in /api/transcribe-bytes that referenced an undefined
source_id in its cleanup path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Introduces the new Studio section (Source -> Characters -> Voices ->
Perform & Export) that reuses the existing Read Aloud/Library/Script
Rehearsal code via DOM reparenting instead of duplicating it, and rolls up
a long tail of bugs found while producing a real audiobook through it:
umlaut-eating name sanitizers, a voice picker that mispositioned itself and
capped results at 60, PDF pagination silently breaking on trimmed \f
markers, a race letting stale audio keep playing after a new line was
clicked, an alias-overlap bug that could silently redirect a voice/image
save onto the wrong character, voice design failing outright during brief
TTS backend restarts instead of retrying, sparse cast entries defaulting to
English/wrong gender, and a reassigned voice never reaching an already-open
Stage session or invalidating its cached audio. Also adds a persistent
per-line audio cache, audiobook export browsing/download, and an inline
voice-design prompt editor. Full details in CHANGELOG.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Add a 6-stage pipeline stepper (Source -> Cast Audiobook -> Cast Characters
-> Script Rehearser -> Generate MP3s -> Audiobook) with direct, non-destructive
jumps between stages and a prominent guided-tour look
- Split PDF import into an explicit "load" then "Extract Text" step, with
in-browser OCR (Tesseract.js, vendored) to recover chapter headlines baked
into a PDF as images instead of real text
- Fix casting feed silently merging pages after leaving/returning: segments
now carry their own page number instead of re-guessing it from text
- Fix excessive "Unknown" speaker attribution: restore the attribution LLM's
output token budget, which had been cut roughly in half and was truncating
dialogue-dense passages
- Fix Theater Play library cards failing to open (dead pre-migration
IndexedDB API calls, missing section navigation)
- Fix bulk "Set tag" wiping a voice's existing tags instead of adding to them
- Start merging Casting's feed with Script Rehearser's Stage UI: collapsible
character sidebar, shared "paper" page styling, inline text editing
- Fix a performance regression from that merge (per-row listeners on every
redraw) by moving to event delegation
- Various layout/clutter fixes: hide reader chrome until a document is
loaded, collapse secondary settings by default, fix overlapping toolbar
icons, fix duplicate "opening" notifications
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Root cause 1 (v1.12.18): `window.loadVoiceLibrary = () => loadVoiceLibrary()`
overwrites the global binding the arrow function references, causing immediate
RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded on every call. Changed to direct
assignment `window.loadVoiceLibrary = loadVoiceLibrary`.
Root cause 2 (v1.12.18): `loadSettings()` called `renderSettingsAbout()` which
lives in conversation.js (batch E), loaded after init.js. Guard added with
typeof check; nav.js already calls it safely when the About section opens.
Also (v1.12.18): s-library.html duplicated cl-book-filter / cl-search / cl-grid
from s-characters.html, breaking getElementById. Characters panel in Library
now redirects to s-characters instead of duplicating its DOM nodes.
Also (v1.12.19): engines.js triggers a second loadVoiceLibrary() after nav.js
already rendered voices, blanking the list briefly. Second call now silently
re-fetches without clearing the list when voices are already present.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Added a new 'Table View' button to the library sort bar.
- Implemented a CSS grid layout to display voice properties in a high-density table.
- Added sortable column headers (Name, Lang, Gender, Speed, dBFS, Length, Rating, Source, Seed, Note, Tags, Active).
- Aligned CSS grid to account for the bulk edit checkbox injection.
- Added drag-and-drop profile image support to the Inspector's large avatar.
- Ensured picture updates instantly synchronize across the List, Table, and Inspector views.
Previously: container names and dynamic card URL overrides only
written to localStorage — lost when accessing from a different
browser or after clearing browser data.
Now:
- engine_container_names added as persisted settings key (dict)
- All container name inputs tagged data-cn-key for loadSettings() lookup
- loadSettings() restores container names + dynamic URLs from server
- settings.js exposes _saveEngineContainerNames() and
_saveEngineLocalUrls() globally so engines.js / ai-backends.js
can call them on every input event
- Static cards (ai-backends.js initStaticDockerManagement): reads
saved name from engine_container_names first, localStorage fallback
- Dynamic Docker stack cards (engines.js): same priority for both
URL and container name; both write to server on change
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Add VERSION file (1.1.0) at repo root
- core/constants.py: expose __version__ read from VERSION file
- routes/admin.py: GET /api/version endpoint returns {version}
- Settings → About: display "v1.1.0" next to app name via /api/version fetch
- CHANGELOG.md: full rewrite following Keep a Changelog + Semantic Versioning
- [Unreleased] staging section at top
- [1.1.0] 2026-05-29 — security, perf, refactor, UX changes from this session
- [1.0.0] 2026-05-28 — all pre-session features documented
- Compare links at bottom pointing to GitHub
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
