tts-voice-creator-clone-and-design-2/Manual.md

User manual

Living manual. Every feature updates this file in the same commit as the code.

Sections for the mature features (voice library, Read Aloud, audiobook casting, Rehearser) are still to be written — this file was created alongside the magazine feature and currently documents that area only.

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Audiobook casting (Read Aloud → Cast as Audiobook)

Purpose

Turn a book into a script with one narrator and one voice per character, ready for the Rehearser and MP3 export.

Prerequisites

• A book open in Read Aloud (PDF or text) and an LLM configured in Settings.

Step by step

1. Open the book, then Cast as Audiobook.
2. The app finds the quotation marks in the text and splits it into narration and spoken lines by itself — this part never changes a word of the book. The LLM is then asked only who speaks each spoken line, in passages of a few thousand characters. A whole novel takes roughly ten minutes (the previous method took hours).
3. Progress shows per passage; Stop Casting keeps what is done and Continue casting resumes.
4. Review the cast as before. Recast unknown re-reads only the lines still marked Unknown, with more context; a line the model cannot place stays Unknown rather than getting a guessed voice. Verify (the second quality run) reads every spoken line a second time with different passage boundaries — about as long as the first cast — and never changes a speaker: lines both readings agree on are marked confirmed (about 4 in 5 of those were right in testing), and lines where they disagree keep the first reading, are flagged in the review list and show what the other reading said. The percentage next to each line means what it says in testing: confirmed lines were about 82 % right, disputed lines about 48 %, lines not yet verified about 76 %. Use the flags to decide where to spend your review time. Neither step can change the book's text, and a stopped or failed run leaves the cast as it was.

Expected result: every word of the book appears exactly once, quoted speech is typed as dialogue and everything else as narration. When the text only refers to a person by role ("der Fremde", "die Baronin"), the line is labelled with that role; later passes merge it into the named character when the book itself ties the two together (e.g. "der Inquisitor Marcian"). Some role labels stay separate — use the character merge in the cast view for those.

Errors, limits and privacy

• If the LLM cannot be reached for a passage, its lines are named from the speech tags around them where possible and otherwise marked Unknown; nothing is lost.
• A book whose speech is not marked with quotation marks (»…«, „…“, “…”, «…») uses the previous whole-passage method automatically. To force the previous method in this browser: localStorage['ab-span-mode'] = '0'.
• The custom attribution prompt in Settings only applies to the older whole-passage method; span mode uses its own fixed instructions (it only asks who speaks each line).
• Book text goes to the LLM you configured, exactly as before; nothing else is sent anywhere. Nothing works offline without a reachable LLM.
• Accuracy: measured against hand-corrected casts of three novels, roughly 90–92 % of all words end up with the right voice and about three quarters of spoken words with the right speaker. Similar-looking characters in the same scene are the usual mix-up; check those in review.

Character concept sheet (Konzeptbild)

Purpose: one picture per character for costume continuity: the character from the front, the side and the back on top; below, the same character in a moment from the book, and their own items (up to three, e.g. Marcian's crossbow).

Prerequisites: a local ComfyUI (Settings > Engines > Image Generation) and the character's Image and Concept Art prompts (Cast Studio > character > Generation Prompts).

Step by step: in Cast Studio tick the characters and choose Consistent profile + reference, or open a character and regenerate its Konzeptbild. Pick Cinematic or Concept art in the style menu first.

Expected result: the lower pictures show the same person as the poses (face, hair, armour or clothing, colours), in the medieval high-fantasy world of the book (stone, timber, tents, torch or daylight, other people in medieval dress), and the item lies on a plain neutral background as an isolated prop, with no hands, feet or other body parts, made in the style and colours of its owner's costume. They contain no writing, captions or modern things. The face in the story moment is taken from the profile picture.

Errors and limits: the fast local model still gets details wrong now and then (a crossbow with a misshapen stock, a second weapon in the background, Concept art coming out close to photographic). Regenerate the sheet; each run uses a new seed. The automatic image check looks at gender, ears and wounds in the story moment, not at modern objects or text, so look at the lower pictures yourself. Sheets made before 2026-10-02 keep their old lower pictures until they are regenerated.

Species: the body shape (for example short dwarf proportions with a full beard) follows only the species the character's own Race / Species field states first. A note in brackets such as "Mensch (oder Zwerg, je nach Kontext …)" or a long remark about other characters is ignored, so such a character is drawn as a human. If a character really is a dwarf but the field says "Mensch (…)", change the field to "Zwerg" and regenerate.

Story moment: the lower picture uses a quote from the character's Sources that names this character (by name, real name or a real alias such as "Murlok von Mengbilla"; "der Zwerg" alone does not count). A quote that only names someone else is never used; without a fitting quote the character's own mannerisms or abilities are shown instead. To change that fallback, edit the character's Mannerisms.

Age: a child or teenager is drawn as one. The app reads the age estimate ("12 Jahre", "zwölfjährig", "fast acht Sommer", "15 years old"), age quotes in Sources, and words like "Kind", "Junge", "Mädchen", "boy", "girl". "Junger Mann" / "Junge Frau" stay adults. If a hedged estimate ("Junges Mädchen / Junger Mann") is drawn wrongly, write the age as a number in Estimated age and regenerate.

Privacy and offline: only the prompts and the profile picture go to your own ComfyUI; nothing leaves your network. Without a reachable ComfyUI nothing is generated.

Accessibility and mobile: the sheet is shown as one image with the character's name as its alternative text; the character's written profile next to it carries the same information.

English prompts for character images

Purpose: the image models work best with English, but character sheets from German books are German. Before a profile or reference-sheet prompt is built, the app translates the character's text (species, appearance, clothing, age, items, story moment, the book's setting) to English with your own LLM.

Prerequisites: the LLM from Settings. Without it the original German text is used.

Usage: nothing to do. Generate prompts or images as before. Your character sheet keeps its German text and is never changed; translations are cached, so a character is translated once and again only after its text changes. To inspect the result without generating anything, call POST /api/character-prompt-preview with a character id.

Expected result: English prompts; the response and the finished image job contain prompt_translation.

Errors: if the LLM is unreachable or its answer fails validation, the original text is used for the affected fields, a warning is logged, prompt_translation.used_untranslated_text is true, and generation continues. Set PROMPT_TRANSLATION=off to disable translation entirely.

Mobile, accessibility, offline: no interface change. Offline (no LLM) falls back to German text.

Privacy: character text goes only to the LLM you configured; cached translations stay in the local database.

Distinct faces for each character

Purpose: characters of one book used to look like members of one family, because most sheets describe no face and the image model then draws its default one. Every character now gets its own face description, so the cast is easy to tell apart. What the book says about a character always wins.

Prerequisites: none. It is part of generating character prompts and images.

Usage: generate profile/reference images as before. The prompt now contains a face: clause such as face: oval face, narrow pointed chin, straight nose, wide-set grey eyes, ..., chestnut hair, shoulder-length wavy hair. Parts the sheet states (for example "schwarzhaarig, blaue Augen") are kept; the other parts are chosen by the app, fitting species, age and gender (no beards for women or children, no elf traits on humans, grey hair for the old), and spread across the characters of the book. The choice is stable: the same character always gets the same face, and adding new characters does not change existing ones. Relatives named in the relationships field (brother, father ...) may share eye colour, hair colour, nose or jaw.

Override: to fix a face, write it in the sheet field visual_face (free text, English works best), for example narrow face, hooked nose, one pale grey eye, black hair tied back. It replaces the generated face. Describing features in the physical appearance also works; those words are kept.

Preview without generating: POST /api/character-face-preview with {"book": "<book title>"} returns every character's face (and where each part came from) plus a similarity matrix and a before/after score; POST /api/character-prompt-preview shows the finished prompt including face_clause. Nothing is generated or saved.

Expected result: clearly different faces within a book. Existing images stay as they are until you regenerate them.

Errors: if the cast cannot be read, the character gets a face from its own sheet alone. Non-human sheets (a raven, the narrator) get no face clause.

Mobile, accessibility, offline: no interface change; works offline (no LLM needed for the face itself).

Privacy: nothing leaves the machine; profiles are derived from the stored sheets and not saved.

Keeping characters apart (profiles and the character library)

Purpose: each character's profile holds only that character's facts.

What the app does: two profiles are treated as the same person only when they share a real name. Labels many people share ("Zwerg", "der Zwerg", "Mann", "Fremder", "Soldat", "Ork-General") never join profiles. A profile is saved to the record with exactly its name. When the cast is known, another cast member's name is never kept as an alias or first/last name (relations such as "Tochter des Promos" stay), and notes in which the model talks to itself ("Warte: ...", "Der Text sagt ...") are removed.

Checking an existing library (administrators): on the server, run python3 scripts/audit_character_records.py for a read-only report of copied profiles, names of other characters in aliases, leaked notes and foreign quotes. To see what a cleanup would change, run python3 scripts/clean_character_records.py --out <folder>: it writes report.md and changes nothing. Only with --apply (after you have read the report) does it save a backup to the folder and change the listed records; copied profiles are only reported, you decide which one to keep (delete or recast the other).

Errors: a profile that was copied or mixed up before this fix keeps its wrong text until you edit it, delete the copy, or recast that character.

Mobile, accessibility, offline: no interface change. Privacy: the scripts run locally against your own database; nothing is sent anywhere.

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Magazines

Purpose

Listen to a magazine or newspaper one article at a time, from its true beginning to its true end, without adverts, sidebars or a neighbouring article spliced into the middle. Each article can be narrated by a single voice, or turned into a podcast discussion between two or three voices you pick.

Prerequisites

• The magazine as a PDF (native text or scanned — both work), or its pages as PNG/JPEG images (scans or phone photos): choose or drop several at once and they become one magazine, pages in filename order (page2 before page10). Up to 300 images of at most 25 MB each; a photo's EXIF rotation is applied. Images carry no text, so every page is read with OCR. Do not mix a PDF with images.
• At least one voice in the library for narration.
• For podcast mode: an LLM configured in Settings (llm_url, llm_model), and two or three voices chosen as hosts.

Step by step

1. Add the magazine. Studio → Add Magazine / Paper. Give it a title and issue, then upload the PDF.
2. Ingest. Ingestion runs in the background — you can close the browser. It renders every page, extracts text (falling back to OCR on scanned pages), classifies each region of the layout, finds the contents page, and proposes articles with page ranges. While it runs, a live preview shows each page's image next to its recognised text as soon as that page finishes -- a detected headline is shown larger, a figure appears as its own picture marker rather than as garbled on-image text, and page furniture is shown dimmed -- so you can see ingestion actually working page by page instead of watching a bare progress bar. This preview is a quick approximation, not the final read: it runs before the layout is fully classified, so a heading guess or an excluded marking here can still change once review opens. The page image also shows the regions as they are found: each box is drawn over the page, coloured by type (headline, paragraph, caption, picture, advert, running head …, see the legend under the page) and numbered in reading order. After all pages are read, the second pass (Recognising paragraphs, headings and advertisements) walks the pages again and the preview follows it, so you can watch boxes change type — the progress bar then reads "… — page 12 of 204". Pictures, charts, tables and code are only recognised in this second pass (the first pass only reads text, and says so under the page); they are drawn as dashed, filled boxes in their own colours — picture orange, chart green, table yellow, code grey — so they stand out from the text boxes, and fitted to the actual picture as soon as that page is labelled (not only once the whole magazine has finished), so the box does not lag behind the real edges of the picture for long. The recognised-text panel shows the actual cropped picture, chart or table for the same reason, rather than a plain "Figure" placeholder, as soon as it has been cropped. The page scan itself (a scanned magazine is one picture per page) is not framed. A proposed picture, chart or table is checked against the page render itself before it is created, so a text area or column gap is not shown as a picture. A real picture can still get a loose or shifted box in some cases; use Refine figures (or re-run detection on the page) to try snapping it again, or fix the box by hand on the review page. If a run is interrupted (for example when the server restarts), the status now says so instead of spinning forever; start it again with Re-run detection.
3. Review the articles. This step is not optional and cannot be skipped. Each proposed article shows its title, author, page range, estimated listening time and a confidence score. The review screen is split: the scanned page on the left with a numbered, icon-labelled box per detected region (title, byline, body text, caption, figure…), and the same regions as text on the right — click either side to highlight the other. Sidebars and pull-out boxes are already unticked for you — tick one back in if you actually want it read. A region already claimed by a different article on the same page is marked with that article's number, so it is never mistaken for unclaimed text. If OCR quality is poor, "OCR again" re-reads just the current page through the configured vision engine (or "OCR again (whole magazine)" from the contents screen for every page, which also resets any articles already reviewed). If a figure's box is drawn in the wrong place or at the wrong size — a common miss, because an OCR engine locates a photo far less precisely than it reads type — "Fix figure boundaries" re-derives every figure box in the issue from the scanned pages themselves. It calls no OCR engine, changes no text and touches no approval, so it is safe to run at any point, including on an issue you are halfway through reviewing; boxes it cannot place confidently are left exactly as they were. If the layout engine missed a region entirely, "Draw it" lets you click-drag a box directly on the page image and add it as text (typed or OCRed) or as a new figure. If a region was found but its box is misplaced, the wrong size, or shouldn't exist at all, "Edit boxes" lets you drag an existing box to move it, drag any of its eight edge/corner handles to resize just that side, or press its × to delete it outright. The per-edge handles matter most when two regions share a boundary — for example a paragraph split wrongly between two boxes — since dragging just the top or bottom handle moves that one shared line without disturbing either box's width or its opposite edge. Moving or resizing opens a small confirm panel — Save keeps the region's existing text at its new position; for a text region, Save & re-OCR also reads the corrected area again and replaces the text with that fresh reading (useful when the box was too small or too large to read cleanly the first time, or after moving a shared boundary). Deleting a region removes it from the page entirely, not just from the article currently under review. Every row in the list on the right also has its own type picker and delete button (the bin icon), so you can fix a region without switching into Edit boxes: change a paragraph into a Headline, a Page number, an Advertisement or any other kind, or turn a text box into an Image (the box is cut out as a figure) and back (the box is read with OCR). Delete asks for confirmation first. The page's reading order is updated after a type change, because a page number or advert is read differently from running text. "Fix reading order" re-reads the order of every page in the issue column by column — left column top to bottom, then the next column — for issues imported before the column detection improved. It changes only the order: text, boxes and approvals stay as they are, although an approved article may now be read in a different (correct) order. Short pull-quotes are read at the end of the page instead of in the middle of a sentence. To set the order yourself, either type a new number into the position box at the front of a row (the region moves there), or press "Order by clicking" and click the boxes on the page in the order they should be read — each clicked box shows its new number, Undo last takes one back, and boxes you skip follow in their current order — then Save order. A page ordered by hand says so above the list and is never reshuffled by Fix reading order, a type change or a newly drawn box (a new box is read last until you move it); "Automatic order" hands the page back to the automatic column order. While you order, a panel pinned to the bottom-right of the window shows how many boxes are numbered and holds Save order, Undo last and Cancel (or press Esc). It stays in view however far you scroll, sits above the Back / Approve bar and clear of the page image, and turns green when every box is numbered. Save order is only enabled once you have clicked at least one box; on a phone the panel spans the width of the screen. "Clean up boxes" fixes four problems across the whole issue at once: short text inside a picture (a label on a screenshot, a word on a slide in a photo) becomes Text in picture; boxes of one or two characters become OCR noise; a box that only repeats a bigger box's text (typically a subheading the paragraph box also read) becomes Duplicate, so it is not read twice; and an author line that runs into the article's first sentence is split into the name and a paragraph of its own. None of these are read aloud, nothing is deleted, every change shows in the list and can be undone with the type picker, and a backup of the page layout is kept (layout.backup-<date>.json in the issue's folder). New imports and OCR again do this automatically. Longer text inside a picture is left for you to judge: it can be real text caught in a picture frame that is too big. Each text row also has three quick actions: Edit text (the pencil) opens the region's text in place — fix OCR mistakes and Save text, or put the cursor where one paragraph ends and press Split here to make two regions (the second is read right after the first); Read again re-runs OCR on just that region; and Merge with the next region joins a paragraph the OCR cut in two (a word broken by a hyphen at the line end is closed up again). Everything works from the keyboard too: ↑/↓ move between regions, Space ticks or unticks, Enter edits the text, R reads again, M merges with the next region and Delete deletes (with Undo); letters typed in the text editor are never taken as shortcuts. To fix many boxes at once, press "Select boxes", then click boxes on the page or drag a rectangle over them (every box at least half inside is selected; X selects the focused row from the keyboard). A bar shows how many are selected: change their type in one go, or delete them. Deleting, changing a type, merging and splitting no longer ask "are you sure?" — they happen at once and an Undo button appears above the list (it undoes the latest change, and only while nothing else has changed since). When a region becomes a picture — drawn as one or changed into one — the short text inside it (a chart's legend and axis labels) automatically becomes Text in picture, so there is nothing left to delete by hand. Use "Two-page spread" to see this page next to its facing page (e.g. 22 and 23), each with its own OCR-results list directly beneath it — useful for lining up a figure or a jump that crosses the gutter. Only one page is editable at a time; click "Edit this page" on the other half to switch which one the drawing and editing tools apply to. Confirm the boundaries, correct the title, then Approve. Optionally, click "Describe" under a figure, chart, table or code block to have the configured vision engine generate a one- or two-sentence description for listeners who cannot see the image — e.g. what a chart measures and its general trend, or a table's row/column headings and what stands out. You can edit the generated text, or write your own from scratch, before approving the article. Generating a description changes nothing about existing narration by itself — it is only spoken if you also turn on "Read figure descriptions" in step 4.
4. Listen. An approved article can be narrated with the default voice, or sent to podcast mode. Pick the narrator (and the podcast hosts) from the same searchable voice picker used elsewhere in the app — open it and type to filter the list. Playback synthesises one sentence at a time, staying a few sentences ahead, so you only wait for the first. To avoid waiting at all, press Prepare audio first: it synthesises the whole article now (starting from where you are, then the part before it), shows progress as "Preparing audio 12 / 24", and can be cancelled with the same button. Once it says "Audio ready", Listen plays straight through from the prepared audio. Prepared audio is held in the browser only — closing or reloading the tab, opening another article, or changing the narrator discards it, and Prepare audio must be run again. Use Play all articles (on the contents screen) to listen through every approved article back to back without returning to this screen between them. A figure from the page is shown automatically as playback reaches it. Word highlighting can be turned off if you find it distracting — it is an estimate based on word length, not a measurement, so it will not always land exactly on the spoken word. Turn on "Read figure descriptions" in the reading controls to have any figure descriptions generated during review spoken aloud where they occur in the article; figures without a generated description are silently skipped, exactly as before this option existed. Driving mode (the button next to the article title) is a full-screen, podcast-style player for the generated MP3s: previous/next article, back 15 s / forward 15 s, large play/pause, a seek bar, a speed button (0.75×–2×, remembered), and Text / Images toggles that show or hide the article text as karaoke (the whole article scrolls, the sentence being read is marked and the current word is highlighted; word timing is estimated from the MP3 position) and the article's current picture. Everything is a large touch target and keyboard reachable; the speed also applies to the playlist player. Hands-free: while a track plays, the lock screen, notification shade, Bluetooth headset and car display show the article title, magazine and first-page artwork and offer play/pause, previous/next article and ±15 s (and seeking, where the device offers it). In driving mode the screen is kept awake while audio plays and allowed to sleep when it is paused or you leave. Both are optional browser features; where one is missing or refused, playback itself is unaffected. Opening driving mode resumes the first unfinished article at the position you left it. Layout and views: driving mode is a top bar, a content area and a controls dock. The dock (position slider, time and playback speed, then previous, back 15 s, play/pause, forward 15 s, next) is always completely visible at the bottom and is never covered or pushed off screen, on phones from 320x568, tablets and in landscape. The top bar has Share, a menu button that shows the current view, Index and Exit. The menu opens a flyout in four groups. View (radio options with icon and name): Picture (the whole picture, no text), Text (the whole text, lyrics-style, no picture) and Split (picture plus three lines, the default; in landscape side by side). Show (switches, label left and switch right; on = thumb right with a tick, off = thumb left with a cross): Show text and Show pictures hide just that part in the views that contain it (so with Split you can drop either), and Minimize text and picture. Playback: Play next article automatically (see below). Theme: one control with Light, Auto and Dark; the chosen one carries a tick. Each control is at least 44 px high and the flyout fits phones from 320 px wide. Keyboard: Enter or Arrow Down opens the menu; Up/Down/Left/Right move over every control, Home/End jump to the first/last, Space or Enter switches or selects, Escape or a tap outside closes it and returns focus to the menu button. Choosing a view closes the flyout; switches and the theme keep it open so you see the effect. Automatic next article: when an article ends it is marked finished and the next article that has audio starts (articles without audio are skipped, the speed stays); title, picture, text and the index follow and a screen reader hears "Now playing: ..." once. After the last article it stops and shows End of magazine (it never starts over). Switch Play next article automatically off to stop after each article. An article whose audio cannot be loaded is skipped with a short message. Older saved views are converted (Lyrics to Text, Compact to Split). Index: the Index button opens a list of all articles of the magazine with their length (articles without audio are dimmed and marked no audio). The article that is playing is highlighted; tap it or press Enter on another to jump there while driving mode keeps playing. Every row is its own item, separated from the next by a thin divider line and generous space above and below (the playing row is highlighted instead), so long two- or three-line titles do not run into each other. Escape or the close button closes the list (Tab stays inside it while open); the controls below stay visible and usable by touch. Lengths come from the already generated audio, nothing is recomputed. Each row also has a round play button (Play for unplayed, Resume with a circular-arrow icon for partly played, Play again with the replay icon for finished articles; it starts that article in driving mode and continues from the saved position), the author as by Name in smaller muted text under the title (omitted when unknown, long names are shortened), and a status icon on the right (empty circle: not played, dashed circle: partly played, check: finished) that also has the text Not played / Partly played / Finished-Played for screen readers and updates live while you listen. Speed is the button after the time next to the slider. Picture zoom: double-tap or double-click, pinch, mouse wheel, the + and - keys, or the zoom in / zoom out / reset buttons on the picture; drag (or arrow keys) to move a zoomed picture; Escape or the reset button returns to full view. Lyrics: the spoken sentence is large and kept in the middle, earlier and later ones are dimmed; tap or press Enter on a sentence to play from it; scrolling by hand stops the automatic following and shows Back to current. With reduced motion switched on in your device the text jumps instead of gliding. Minimize (in the menu) reduces the area to the title and the current line so the dock keeps minimal text; choose it again to expand. Your view and the minimized state are remembered in this browser only. Titles wrap to two lines (with an ellipsis beyond that), picture captions to two lines. Theme (night driving): the Theme control at the end of the menu offers Auto (follows the system, default), Light and Dark (night). Dark is a night palette for the whole driving overlay (top bar, menu, index and rows, text lines, slider, dock, zoom buttons, the Tap to play button, toasts and the share box): true black background, text at about 85% white, a muted blue accent, pictures slightly dimmed, and the browser's address bar colour follows while driving mode is open and is restored when you leave. Text keeps at least 4.5:1 contrast and buttons/borders 3:1, also for rows without audio (shown dimmed with a dashed play button); the listening states stay distinguishable by icon, not only by colour, and the focus ring and spoken-word highlight stay clearly visible. Auto switches live when your phone changes between day and night mode. The choice is independent of the rest of the app and remembered in this browser only (if storage is blocked it applies until you leave the page). Nothing glides or fades in extra for the theme, so reduced-motion settings are unaffected. How much text (Split view): the menu section Text in Split view sets the amount, remembered on this device. Sentence (default) shows only the sentence being read, large; Context shows the previous sentence (small), the current one (large) and the next (small); Paragraph shows the whole paragraph the sentence belongs to with the current sentence bold and underlined and the spoken word marked. The text frame always stays between the picture and the controls: the current text shrinks from 1.5 rem down to 1 rem (it follows your device's text size and browser zoom) until it fits, the picture gives way before the text is squeezed, and whatever still does not fit scrolls inside its frame while following the spoken word (scroll by hand to look around; it follows again at the next sentence). In landscape the picture and the text sit side by side. The Text view always shows the whole text. Tap or press Enter on a dimmed line (Context, Paragraph) to jump to it; the text is not announced sentence by sentence. Context lines: with Context, driving mode shows the previous sentence (small), the current one (large, the spoken word marked) and the next (small) in a box of fixed height, so nothing moves around it. Tap or press Enter on the previous or next line to jump to that sentence. The text is deliberately not announced by screen readers sentence by sentence; the play/pause button and the position slider stay the way to control it. With reduced motion switched on in your device, lines change without animation. On a phone (375 px wide) the sentences wrap and a very long current sentence scrolls inside its box. Turn the text off with Show text in the menu to see only the picture. Lyrics in the older wording is now the Text view. Text and picture follow the voice: for audio generated since sentence times were recorded, the highlighted sentence (playlist and driving mode) and the picture shown come from the exact time each sentence was spoken, so they stay right after the slider, the 15-second buttons, a tap on a sentence, the lock screen or a resume. Captions are shown but are not in the MP3, so they are never highlighted. The highlight lights up a sentence just before its first word is heard (each sentence starts with a short silence, which is not counted). Audio from before sentence times were recorded, and audio whose text was edited afterwards, has no usable record and is followed by an estimate from sentence length (less exact); regenerate the audio to get exact sync. Interview-voice audio is covered like any other. Word by word: the first time an article is played, the app asks the forced-aligner service (the separate tts-aligner container, see below) to measure where each word starts and ends and stores that beside the audio. Playback never waits for it: until it is ready (usually well under a minute for a magazine article) the marked word is estimated from word length as before, and it switches to the measured word on its own. The marked word is the last one that has started, so it stays lit through a pause; the Lyrics view now marks the spoken word too (as do Compact and the playlist text). If the service is not running, nothing changes for you and the app tries again later (at most every 10 minutes per article). Prerequisites: docker compose up -d tts-aligner (first start downloads about 1.2 GB of model weights into the aligner-models volume; after that it needs no internet). ALIGNER_URL empty turns word timing off. Privacy: text and audio go only to your own container on the internal Docker network. Accessibility: the marking is visual only and adds no announcements; with reduced motion nothing animates. API: POST /api/magazine/{doc}/articles/{id}/align-words starts it explicitly, GET shows progress. Share a link: the Share button in the toolbar (the whole magazine), the share button in the playlist header and the one at the top left of driving mode (the current article) share a link of the form <this app's address>/#s-magazine?doc=<magazine>&article=<article>&mode=drive. Where the browser has a share sheet (phones, and any browser on https) it opens; otherwise the link is copied and a confirmation is announced (on a plain-http address a box with the link is shown to copy by hand). Opening the link goes straight to that article in driving mode with audio, pictures and text; if the browser refuses to start audio without a tap, a large Tap to play button appears. A link for the whole magazine opens at its first unfinished article. Privacy and access: the link contains only ids, no password or key. It is just an address: whoever opens it needs to reach this app the same way as for any other page (this app has no user accounts; access is controlled by your network or reverse proxy), and an unknown or removed article simply shows a message. Only articles that already have audio can be shared. A link whose parameters are not in the expected form is ignored.

Expected result: the article plays from its headline to its final paragraph. Page furniture (running heads, page numbers), adverts, sidebars and pull quotes are never read aloud unless you explicitly include them in review.

Confidence, and what it means

Shown	Meaning
~90%	The contents page listed this article — title and start page are known.
~55%	Detected from a headline alone; check the boundaries carefully.
Low	No body copy found. Usually an advert or a section divider — reject it.

An article is never narrated until you approve it, whatever its confidence.

Podcast mode

Choose two or three voices as hosts. The configured LLM writes a discussion of that article for listeners who have not read it, and each host's turns are synthesised with their voice.

The prompt forbids inventing facts, figures or quotes that are not in the article; if the article reaches no conclusion the hosts say so. It is still a generated discussion, not the author's words — treat it as a summary, and read the original for anything that matters.

Podcast generation is refused for an article you have not approved, because unreviewed boundaries may include a neighbouring article or an advert.

What is wrong on this page, and fixing it automatically

Purpose: see at a glance what is wrong with a page and fix it without hunting for the right button. Steps: open a page in review. The What is wrong on this page panel lists each problem in plain language and marks it on the page: red dashed frame = printed text outside any box (never read); orange edge = a box edge cutting through text; purple dashed outline = two boxes over the same text; yellow dotted outline = words that look mis-read; red wavy underline (in the list) = words no dictionary knows. Each row has its own button (Find missed text, Fit boxes to the text, Verify OCR text, Fix with language model). Fix this page automatically does all of them in one go: fits boxes, adds an inset pull quote, cuts a paragraph that wraps around it, finds missed text, re-reads suspicious words and, when a language model is configured, fixes provable misspellings. Result: the page reloads with what was fixed; Undo (above the list) restores the page as it was. Overlapping boxes have no automatic fix: delete or merge one. Where an article ends: the last box says article ends only when the article is signed off ((rah) et) or a headline/deck/byline follows it (same page or top of the next). Otherwise it shows no end marker — link page N ›; click it to add the text of that page that carries the article on (Undo reverses it). Reading order: applied automatically after import, OCR again and Fix this page automatically; pages whose order you set by hand keep it (Automatic order releases a page). Text flow: green arrows and chips on the page show where the article carries on: an arrow to the next box below, a curved next column arrow, and a chip continues on page N › / ‹ from page N, plus article starts / ends. Tick or untick Show text flow to hide them. In the reading view a small marker (↓, col ›, p.N ›) sits at the word where a paragraph crosses a box, column or page. The markers are labelled for screen readers. Whole magazine: a fresh import now runs this automatically as its last step -- the magazine you open is already as fixed as the machine can make it. Auto-fix all pages (contents view, formerly Quality check / run) repeats it on demand (for instance after a manual box edit) and lists the pages that still need a look (purple badges). Errors: a failed fix shows the reason and changes nothing. Offline / privacy: the box fixes and the audit are local; the OCR re-read and spelling steps use only the engines you configured.

Colours in the article list: a blue row with a not reviewed pill is an article nobody has approved or rejected yet; a green edge means approved.

Undo and Redo

Purpose: take back a change (or put it back) without leaving review. Steps: use Undo / Redo in the sticky bar (at the left of its second row), or Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z (Ctrl+Y). The button tooltip names the change, e.g. "Undo: Deleted 2 regions". The last 20 recorded changes are kept per magazine: region edits and moves, drawing a region, approving/rejecting an article, page linking, auto-fix, reading-order changes, box clean-up and spelling corrections. Errors: a button stays disabled when there is nothing to undo/redo, or when something else has changed the magazine since (for example a whole-magazine run), because undoing then would roll that work back too. A new change ends the redo history. Privacy: the saved states live in the magazine's own undo/ folder; nothing is sent anywhere.

Less manual work: what happens automatically

At import (as its automatic last step, not a separate click any more), and whenever you press Auto-fix all pages: boxes are fitted, inset pull quotes found, wrapped paragraphs cut, continuation pages linked into the article running from the page before, missed text added, suspicious words re-read and (with a language model) provable misspellings fixed. The report then lists only the pages that need a decision about their boxes, with Start with page N; pages that only have words to check are collapsed and optional. Articles that gained pages go back to detected, so re-approve them (the batch tools in Select do many at once). A backup of the layout is kept. The ingest status bar keeps showing progress ("Checking page N of M: …") through this step, so a fresh import simply takes longer before it says done -- an Auto-fix failure (for example an unreachable OCR engine) is reported as an ingest failure rather than a silent gap, but nothing already imported is lost. When the automatic link misses: open the article in review and use Link to page N in the panel: Article continues there adds the text that belongs on that page (from the paragraph that carries the sentence on, up to the next headline), Article starts there adds the opening. Added text is ticked, so untick what does not belong. Undo reverses it.

Clean up boxes: fitting boxes to the text

Clean up boxes (review toolbar) also fits each text box to the ink of its text: a side that cuts through letters grows a little, empty margin is trimmed. Boxes you drew or resized are never changed; a backup of the layout is kept and the message reports how many boxes were fitted.

Inset pull quotes: a quote set into the text in a display colour is added as its own pull quote region (unticked, never read aloud) by OCR again (this page) and Clean up boxes. If a picture or infographic is picked up by mistake, delete the region or change its type.

One paragraph, one block — even across columns and pages

Purpose: a paragraph that continues into the next column or onto a later page is separate regions in the layout. Reading and the MP3 join them before splitting into sentences, so narration never stops mid-sentence at a seam. Prerequisites: none — this happens automatically for every approved article. How it works: consecutive body regions are joined when the first one does not end a sentence and the next one continues it (lower-case start, trailing hyphen or comma, or ending on an article/preposition/conjunction). A word split at the seam is closed up (jähr- + lich → jährlich); a real compound hyphen is kept (KI- + Modelle). Headings, interview turns and finished paragraphs are never glued together, and a caption or figure description between two fragments is moved after the paragraph. Result: the reading view and the exported MP3 speak the fused paragraph as one block; highlighting and "Original page" still follow the region each sentence started in. Errors: if two paragraphs are wrongly joined or a split is missed, correct the region text or reading order in review; the text is recomputed each time. Mobile / accessibility / offline / privacy: no extra controls; nothing leaves the machine.

Pronunciation & spelling (per article)

Open an article and expand Pronunciation & spelling under the player.

Acronyms — purpose: say NAS, ML or SSD the way a listener expects, in the article's language. The language is decided once for the whole article (a short fragment alone is a poor signal); an English quotation inside a German article is spoken with English expansions. Steps: unfamiliar acronyms are listed with the sentence they appear in. Type how the narrator should say one (empty = as printed) — the change applies immediately and stays with the article — or press Let the language model decide: it picks expansion, letter by letter or as a word from the sentence's context and, for English acronyms in a German article, prefers the established German term. Only expansions carry model-written words; letters/word choices are decided by the server. Known acronyms: a built-in list covers common German and English ones (KI, AI, LLM, API, GPU, USB → "U S B", HDMI, z. B. …). The displayed text is never changed.

Spelling — purpose: find OCR and typing errors in German and English text without ever rewriting names or technical terms by guess. What is flagged: a word unknown in the text's language, not a known compound (Softwareentwicklung), not known in the other language (an English term inside a German article is fine), not an acronym, not a name in mid-sentence English, and not a word you kept. A word that recurs three or more times is treated as vocabulary. Marked on the page: in review, flagged words are underlined in the region list and the Spelling button lists them for the page with suggestions. In the reading view the same list is under Pronunciation & spelling. Click a suggestion to correct the word in the region text (review offers Undo), or Keep to add it to this issue's dictionary. Fixed by an agent: Fix with language model (page or article) asks the configured LLM about each flagged word with its sentence. A correction is applied only if it is one of the dictionary's suggestions or a single known word within two edits of the printed one; names and terms the model keeps go into the issue's dictionary, everything else stays marked. The whole-magazine Quality check / run does the same for every page (when an LLM is configured) and lists pages that still have marked words. Errors: "No LLM model configured" — set one in Settings; the marked list still works without it. A stale suggestion ("the text has changed") — reload the list. Mobile / accessibility: the lists are ordinary buttons with labels ("Replace X with Y"); marks are underlined, not colour-only. Privacy: the agent sends only the flagged word and its surrounding sentence to the LLM you configured in Settings; without an LLM nothing leaves the machine.

The page overview: what every page needs from you

Purpose. The page grid (the Thumbnails view of a magazine's contents) shows every page of the issue at once and tells you, in words, where you still have to act.

Steps. Read the line above the grid: "N of M pages need you". Tick Show only pages that need me to hide everything the system has settled. Each card shows, top to bottom: the page, how many articles are on it, each article's title with "continues from p.X" / "continues on p.Y" where it flows to another page, a status (for example Text found, not checked yet, Problems found, Approved, Done: audio is ready, Advertisement: not read), and either a blue To do box or "Nothing to do here". Click the page image to open it in Review.

Filter by status. Every entry of the legend (not reviewed yet, has content, not quality-checked, quality check clean, quality check found problems, reviewed, advertisement, reviewed + audio generated, reviewed, nothing to narrate) is a button showing how many pages have that status. Press one to show only those pages; press several to show pages that have any of them; press one again to take it off. A status no page has is greyed out. It combines with Show only pages that need me (a page must match both), the summary says "Showing N of M pages", and Show all pages clears every filter at once. The buttons are real toggle buttons (they announce whether they are on) and can be used from the keyboard.

What the to-do lines mean. Open the page … and approve it: detection found text and nobody has confirmed it. Problems found lists what the quality check saw and which tool fixes it (Find missed text, Clean up boxes, Spelling, merge or shrink overlapping boxes, keep a page in one article only). Text was found here but it belongs to no article: link the page to the article it continues, or start a new one. Generate the audio: approved, but no MP3 yet. N of the M articles here still wait for approval: a page shared by several articles is coloured by its most advanced one, so check the others. A small grey note tells you when a page you approved had problems that the quality check found earlier.

Expected result. When the summary says nothing is left, every page is approved, settled as an advertisement or empty, or has audio.

Errors / limits. The quality-check lines appear only after a quality run (Auto-fix all pages or Quality check); before that, pages show the status only. A page with no text and no article is reported as having nothing to do, which is right for a full-page picture but worth a glance if you expected text.

Mobile / accessibility. Status and to-do are plain text beside the colour, so nothing depends on seeing colours; the legend is 14 px with large swatches. On a phone use fewer columns (the Columns slider) for more readable cards.

EPUB with synchronised audio

Purpose. Take an issue to an e-reader or reading app that highlights the sentence being spoken (EPUB 3 Media Overlays).

Prerequisites. At least one approved article with generated audio. Only those are included, in contents order.

Steps. Open the magazine's contents and press EPUB with audio. The book downloads; open it in a reader that supports read-aloud overlays (for example Thorium Reader, Apple Books, or Readium-based apps).

Expected result. One chapter per article, a table of contents, the MP3s inside the file, and each sentence linked to its place in the audio. The file passes the W3C EPUBCheck (0 errors, 0 warnings on a real two-article, twelve-minute test).

How exact is the highlighting. Audio rendered after 2026-09-30 (including interview-voice renders) records where every sentence starts and ends, so the highlight is exact. Older audio has no such record: its sentences are placed by estimate, proportionally to their length across the real duration, so the highlight can drift by a sentence or two. The book's description states which it is; to get exact timings for an older article, regenerate its MP3.

Errors. No approved article with audio gives "No approved article has audio yet". Audio whose length cannot be read is skipped. Sidebars and figures are not part of the book.

Mobile / accessibility. The book is reflowable text, so text size and contrast are set in the reader. A screen reader reads the text directly; the overlay is an addition, not a replacement.

Offline. The file is self-contained. Privacy. It contains the magazine's text and your generated audio, so share it only where the magazine's licence allows.

A page that was scanned sideways or upside down

Purpose. Some scans arrive turned: the page looks sideways, and what OCR read from it is gibberish.

Prerequisites. A vision OCR engine set up in Settings (the same one OCR again uses), because turning re-reads the page.

Steps. Open the page in Review and press Turn right (90° clockwise), Turn left (90° counter-clockwise) or Turn 180°. The app asks first, then turns the page image, reads the page again, and shows the result. Tick two-page spread to choose which of the two pages the buttons act on, as with the other page tools.

Expected result. The page stands upright, its boxes and text are new readings of the upright page, and the page's quality findings are re-measured. On a test page, reading it sideways scored word-F1 0.02 and reading it after turning 0.88 (an ordinary page scores about 0.88). The turn is remembered: re-running detection or re-importing does not flip the page back.

While a turn is being read the picture and text you see are the old ones: the notice above the page says so, shows the time spent, and dims them until the read finishes (usually 30 to 60 seconds). The text is never turned itself; it is read again from the turned picture.

Keeping track of turns. Turns add up: a right turn plus a half turn is three quarters. The toolbar says so in words (for example "Turned 270° clockwise from the scan") and offers Undo turns, which returns the page to the orientation the PDF itself gives it. Only one turn or re-read of a page can run at a time: pressing a button again while one is still working is refused with a message, instead of stacking a second turn. The turned picture appears as soon as the page is re-read; page pictures are requested under a version number, so a browser that remembered the old picture fetches the new one. Note what a PDF's own orientation can be: some pages are stored sideways on purpose (c't page 156 is a landscape page that reads sideways), and one Turn right is then the whole fix.

What is replaced. The page's boxes and text are replaced by the new reading, so corrections you made to that page by hand are lost, and articles that used the page go back to "not approved" where the new boxes do not line up with the old ones. Undo does not cover a turn (it changes the page image); if you turned the wrong way, press the opposite button.

How the page is read after a turn. An OCR engine can read a page well in one orientation and return nothing in another (on a real page it read the sideways image at word-F1 0.88 and gave an empty answer for the same page turned upright). So after a turn the app tries, in order: the turned page with your vision engines; then the page as it was scanned, with the boxes carried over into the turned page; then tesseract on the turned page. The first plausible reading wins, and the finished message says which was used. A picture page with no text can be turned too.

Errors. Without a vision OCR engine nothing is changed and you are told why. If neither the engines nor tesseract can read the page, the page image is put back exactly as it was and nothing is saved. A page that has a real text layer in the PDF is read from its image after a turn, because the PDF's own text positions belong to the unturned page.

Mobile / accessibility. The three buttons are real buttons in a labelled group, each with its direction in words, and the confirmation is a dialog you can answer with the keyboard.

Privacy. The page image goes to the OCR engine you configured, exactly as for OCR again.

Editing recognised text, and seeing what you changed

Purpose. Fix what OCR got wrong and always be able to see, and undo, what you changed.

Fix a flagged word where it stands. Words the spelling check doubts are underlined in the region's text. Click one (or Tab to it and press Enter): only that word turns into a small field, in the same type as the paragraph, so nothing around it moves or changes. Type the correction and press Enter, or click one of the suggested words; Esc puts the word back; Keep stops flagging a name or technical term in this issue. Each fix can be undone with Undo, like every other correction.

Steps. In Review, click a region's text away from an underlined word (or its pencil) to edit the whole text in place: it keeps the paragraph's type, width and line breaks, grows with what you type, and the doubtful words stay underlined (an underline goes as soon as the word is changed). Press Save text. A region you edited shows an Edited mark. Show changes opens a word-by-word comparison with the text as first recognised: words removed are struck through and marked with a minus, words added are underlined and marked with a plus (never colour alone). Restore recognised text puts the original back. Typing the original back yourself also clears the mark.

Expected result. The first recognised text is kept through any number of edits; reading the region again (Re-OCR) makes the new reading the original. Edits are reversible with Undo as before.

Errors. Empty text is refused (delete the region instead). Very long texts (over about 1,500 words) are compared as one removed block and one added block rather than word by word.

Mobile / accessibility. The buttons are real buttons with an expanded/collapsed state; the comparison is a labelled group that explains the minus/plus convention to a screen reader.

Privacy. The recognised text stays on the server with the magazine; nothing is sent elsewhere.

Find an issue online

Purpose. Pull a magazine issue into the app without leaving for a browser and uploading by hand.

Prerequisites. Internet access for the Internet Archive. For your own library, an OPDS catalogue (Calibre-Web, Kavita or Komga all serve one): open Your catalogues (OPDS) in the same panel and add its name and address (for example http://nas.local:8083/opds/). If it needs a login, enter the username and the name of an environment variable that holds the password (for example NAS_OPDS_PASSWORD), and set that variable for the app's container; the password itself is never typed into, stored in, or shown by the app, and it is sent only to that catalogue's own address. The list tells you if the variable is not set on the server. Up to 10 catalogues. Use an https:// address for a catalogue reached over the internet: a login to an http:// address travels unencrypted.

Steps.

1. Open Magazines. In Find an issue online pick a source, type a title or subject, press Search.
2. Read the licence line on each result. The source states it, the app does not judge it.
3. Press Import on a result. The PDF downloads (progress is announced under the search box), the magazine opens and ingestion starts, exactly as after an upload.

Expected result. A new magazine project with the PDF stored locally, then the normal review-before-narration flow.

Errors. A source that is down, rate-limiting or returns something other than a PDF gives a plain message under the search box and nothing is created that you must clean up beyond the empty project shown in your library. Lending-only Internet Archive items are never listed. Only one download runs at a time; a PDF larger than 400 MB is refused. A catalogue's results are read across up to five of its result pages, so "next page" of a large library works.

Mobile / accessibility. The form stacks on a phone; results are a list with labelled Import buttons; status text is a polite live region, so a screen reader hears "N results" and download progress.

Offline. Search and import need the network; everything after import works offline.

Privacy. Your search words go to the chosen source (archive.org, or your own catalogue). Nothing else is sent. Websites that redistribute commercial magazines without a licence are deliberately not supported.

Quality check / run (whole magazine)

Purpose: find every page where text is not inside a box, boxes overlap or cut off letters, or OCR still looks wrong. Prerequisites: the magazine has been ingested. A vision OCR engine (Settings) is optional; without it the word re-reading step is skipped and the result says so. Steps: on the contents screen press "Quality check / run" (first button in the toolbar) and confirm. Progress shows "Checking page N of M". Result: the run (1) adds text regions that independent OCR found outside every box (unticked, so nothing new is read aloud until you approve it), (2) re-reads suspicious words from the page image and only accepts a clearly better reading, (3) measures the page image for ink outside every box, overlapping text boxes, boxes whose edge (left, right, top or bottom) cuts through text, and articles that claim the same regions (the same text would be read twice). Pages that still need a look are listed as buttons under the toolbar; each opens that page in review. Errors: one page failing does not stop the run; it is listed as "check failed". The report is kept in the magazine's folder (quality_report.json) and served at GET /api/magazine/{id}/quality/report. Page colours and live indicator: in the thumbnail grid, pages the run found clean turn blue and pages with problems turn purple, whatever their review state (only a page whose every article was rejected keeps its grey). A purple warning badge with the problem count sits on the thumbnail; hover or focus it to read what was found, click it to open the page in review. The colour reflects the last run — run the check again after fixing pages. While the run is going, the page being worked on pulses and names its step (finding missed text / re-reading suspicious words / measuring box coverage), and finished pages show "✓ checked". Pulsing is disabled under reduced-motion. The same live indicator works for every batch step while the thumbnail grid is showing: reading pages (OCR), finding advertisements / recognising paragraphs during detection, fixing all figure boundaries, and rendering audio (the pages of the article being rendered pulse with "rendering audio n/total"). Advertisement pages: a page where detection found advertisement regions and no article text turns green with a dashed border on its own — nothing on it is read aloud and the quality check skips it. No approval step is needed; a page that mixes an ad with article text is treated as an ordinary page. Mobile / accessibility: the list is a labelled live region of ordinary buttons, keyboard reachable. Offline / privacy: the missed-text pass uses local OCR; the word re-read uses only the vision engine you configured. Nothing else leaves the machine.

Untitled entries ("Page 33") and continuation pages

Purpose: clean up contents/driving-mode entries that have no real title (Page 33, Page 69 …). Most of them are continuation pages of the article before them that ended up as entries of their own. The others are advert pages, picture pages, or short text fragments. Why they exist: the review screen creates such an entry when you open a page no article covers. A page loses its article when an article is approved on another page without any box being toggled: only the visible page's boxes were saved, so the other pages fell out of the article. What you get (nothing changes on its own):

• Every entry now carries a display title. Real titles are shown unchanged. Placeholder titles show a suggestion instead: Anzeige, Bildseite, Inhalt, Impressum, Editorial, Textfragment, the page's own headline, or its first sentence (at most 8 words). The page number comes separately (page_label, e.g. "Seite 33") so the index can show it in smaller text.
• A merge proposal when an entry looks like the continuation of the previous article. Each proposal has a confidence (high ≥ 0.75, medium ≥ 0.5) and the evidence, for example "starts lower-case / mid-sentence", "previous text ends in a hyphenated word break", "adjacent page" or "previous article is signed off".
• GET /api/magazine/{id}/untitled lists all of them with counts. The quality report (GET …/quality/report) carries the same list as untitled_articles. Steps:

1. Look at the proposals (GET …/untitled, or the dry run below).
2. Merge one: POST /api/magazine/{id}/articles/{article}/merge-into-previous with {"into": "<proposed id>"}. It can be undone with Undo.
3. Accept a title: POST …/articles/{article}/accept-title (optionally {"title": "…"}). An entry that already has a real title is refused, so titles you typed are never overwritten.
4. Optional, better titles from the local LLM: POST …/titles/suggest (background job). It only fills the suggestion cache (title_suggestions.json). Switch it off with the setting magazine_llm_titles: false.
5. Whole magazine from the command line: python3 scripts/magazine_untitled.py <doc-id> is a dry run that changes nothing. Add --apply to write: a backup articles.backup-untitled-<time>.json comes first, then every proposal ≥ --min-confidence (default 0.75) is merged in page order and suggested titles go into placeholder titles. --no-llm keeps it fully deterministic. Expected result: continuation pages become part of their article (pages and regions in reading order), and the index shows readable names with the page number beside them. After a merge: the merged article is marked audio_stale ("render the audio again"). Its old MP3 still plays the shorter text until you render it again, and a fresh render clears the mark. The merged-away entry's MP3 and timings stay on disk and are not deleted. An approved article stays approved only if both parts were approved. Errors: "The proposal changed" (409) means the articles changed since the list was loaded, so reload and look again. "No merge is proposed" (409) means the entry is not a continuation by the current rules. If the LLM is unreachable, the run says so once and uses the deterministic titles. Mobile / accessibility: data only (API fields). The index shows display_title with page_label in smaller text, and the full title stays available to screen readers. Offline / privacy: the heuristics run locally. LLM titles use only the LLM configured in Settings and send it at most 1,500 characters of the entry's text.

Errors

What you see	What happened	What to do
"Upload the PDF first"	The project has no source.pdf.	Upload it, then ingest.
Ingestion failed	The PDF is encrypted or corrupt.	Check it opens in a viewer.
"Approve the article before generating a podcast"	Review gate.	Approve it first.
"No LLM model configured"	llm_model is empty.	Set it in Settings.
"LLM did not return usable JSON"	The model ignored the format.	Retry, or pick a stronger model.
"Article has too little text"	Under 200 characters — usually a stub.	Check the boundaries in review.
A figure box sits over the wrong part of the page	The OCR engine grounded the figure loosely.	Press "Fix figure boundaries"; if the graphic is too pale to detect, draw the region by hand.
"Fix figure boundaries" reports nothing corrected	Every box already matched its page, or none could be placed with confidence.	Nothing is wrong; correct any remaining box by drawing it.
"No vision OCR engine configured" (Describe)	vision_ocr_url/vision_ocr_model are empty.	Set a vision engine in Settings.
"The vision engine returned nothing usable for this figure"	The configured engine (and fallback, if set) returned an empty or degenerate response for this image. Some vision models are transcription-only and cannot produce open-ended descriptions at all, however the prompt is phrased — confirmed with a pure-OCR model that answers its own "Text Recognition:" prompt but returns nothing for any descriptive one.	Configure a genuinely caption-capable vision model as the fallback (vision_ocr_fallback_url/vision_ocr_fallback_model), or write the description by hand.
"Save & re-OCR" on an edited box leaves the old text in place	The corrected area produced an empty or unreadable OCR result — the same engine limitation that can affect figure descriptions applies here too.	Press Save to keep the corrected box position with the existing text, then correct the text by hand if needed, or try "OCR again (this page)" once the box position is saved.

Privacy

Ingestion, OCR and storage are entirely local to the container. Podcast mode is one exception: the article's text is sent to whatever LLM llm_url points at. Generating a figure description is the other: the cropped image is sent to whatever vision_ocr_url (and, on failure, vision_ocr_fallback_url) points at. If either is a hosted API rather than a model on your own network, that content leaves your machine. Narration uses your local TTS stack and sends nothing outward.

Accessibility and mobile

Sentence and word highlighting both respect prefers-reduced-motion (no smooth-scroll animation when it is set; the highlight itself is a colour change, not motion). Driving mode gives large, high-contrast controls (skip, ±15 s, play/pause, speed) — hide Text and Images for a bare screen — for use without looking at the screen — it does not, and should not, replace watching the road. Word-level highlighting can be switched off in the reading controls if it is more distracting than helpful; sentence highlighting keeps working either way. Keyboard navigation of the contents tree and review screen is not yet built.

Offline

Ingested magazines are stored server-side, so any device on the network sees the same library and reading progress. Playback needs the server; there is no offline cache yet.