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>
