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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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).
• 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.
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. 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) switches to two large controls and nothing else, for listening without looking at the screen.

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.

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 two large, high-contrast controls (skip, play/pause) with nothing else to interact with, 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.