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.

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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. 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. 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.