0.26.3-beta

This release introduces a manga viewer to the application, opening up opportunities for users that desire to use renowned community tools such as Tachiyomi and Kaku together in a symbiotic manga OCR mining workflow.

Users are advised that this feature is intended for use in complement with the existing applications listed. The application will load manga from a Tachiyomi directory, which can be set in the main menu drop-down.

Once a chapter has been loaded in the viewer, the user may use Kaku alongside the application. Users may tap on Kaku's notification shade to hide or show its OCR overlay box. Once results are obtained, holding onto the Kaku results box with the working area unfocused will allow users to append or replace working text towards Anki export or search with their own imported dictionaries.

Users are highly recommended to review Kaku's tutorial for instructions on how to manage and correct results before piping them into the application. A keyboard with handwriting support will also come in handy for single character corrections.

Developer Note: This version has yet to be tested for scoped storage support, and Android 11 may prevent access to wherever Tachiyomi stores its manga downloads and block use of this feature on select devices.

System Requirements: This application has been tested by myself and other users to work on a variety of real-world devices and emulators running Android 6 and above.

Features that are enabled by text segmentation are available on Android devices with a version greater or equal to Android 7 (thanks to howalon for testing). Use of custom dictionaries requires Android 7 or above. If the installation fails, try clearing enough storage space. Please note that a significant amount of internal storage space may be taken up by the dictionary database for indexing in order to optimize query speed and performance.

0.26-beta

• (New Feature) Manga Viewer - A full featured manga viewer has been added to the application with a familiar menu, continuous scrolling and chapter progress tracking
• (New Feature) Manga Mining Workflow - Users may use Kaku alongside the application when reading to use the app, allowing for custom dictionaries, Anki export and less friction on handling text results
• (New Feature) Tachiyomi Library Support - Users may set their Tachiyomi directory to read their manga on jidoujisho complete with covers and chapters
• (New Feature) Crop Image - Users may now crop their exported image in the Creator in order to better frame images on their cards
• (New Feature) Set Alias Name and Cover - Users may now set a custom alias name and cover for books and manga to override auto-detected information
• Player and History tabs have been merged in order to make way for the Viewer tab, and the main menu bottom bar has been reordered
• Users may set a list of sources to hide from All sources in the main menu Viewer tab when setting their Tachiyomi directory
• In order to address possible user confusion, Anki templates have now been unified and all exports will use a single jidoujisho template

0.26.1-beta

• Local source manga are now include as a source if available in the Viewer tab
• Quick word select dialogs will now allow selection of more than one item for selection, tapping will toggle an item's inclusion
• Full screen mode is now disabled in the Viewer to decrease user error among non-gesture navigation users
• A search button has been added in the Viewer working area for searching the entire working text
• Fixed an issue where the dictionary widget in the Viewer would flicker or rebuild when changing focus
• Fixed an issue where recursive dictionary lookups in the Viewer caused the menu from a Kaku result to appear
• Fixed an issue where sentence and word were not both exported when exporting from the Viewer
• Fixed an oversight where definitions overflowed when too long and online definitions did not allow for recursive lookups

0.26.2-beta

• Added an option to launch Kaku in the Viewer menu allowing users to easily open the OCR overlay within the app
• Fixed an oversight where manga shown in the Viewer tab was sorted by name disregarding name alias
• Fixed an issue where swiping topmost to open the notification shade in the Viewer would not hide afterwards
• Fixed an issue where clicking on the top or bottom bars in the Viewer when invisible would allow focus
• Fixed an issue where swiping to reveal the notification shade or changing keyboard focus disappeared a custom dictionary definition result

0.26.3-beta

• Improved offline results for some words that end with そうに that did not return results and parse incorrectly, i.e. 溢れそうに
• Fixed an issue where the audio/subtitles menu would not open in the Player for YouTube videos without closed captions preventing users from requesting automatic captions
• Fixed an issue where an empty manga folder without chapters would not be rendered properly a manga grid item in the Viewer tab
• Fixed an issue where when the top and bottom bars are invisible in the Viewer, tapping the area will not unhide the bars
• Fixed an oversight where tapping on the Viewer tab when active would not scroll the tab up like other tabs

Symbiosis with existing tools for Japanese through jidoujisho's manga mining workflow

Developer Note: This is a long-requested feature that I've turned down to implement from several users, and now I've figured out how to make this work. What made this possible is the existing abundance of community tools for reading manga on Android. Tachiyomi is renowned as a site-aggregating manga reader, and Kaku is commonly used by Japanese learners for optical character recognition on Android devices.

Truth be told, I dabbled a bit on implementing the optical character recognition myself in making this. I tried to make use of Tesseract, read through documentation - I soon came to the conclusion that what time I was squandering was essentially reinventing the wheel. These tools are invaluable independent of each other, and my approach in making this workflow happen is not to reinvent the wheel but to find a way to make these things function well together. Rather than emulate features in a subpar capacity, my goal instead was to leverage existing tools and make the best in filling the blanks that were yet to be filled.

I'm very happy to release this feature after a long sprint, and I hope that this is found to be useful - maybe this will let me give this medium a better chance. I will be resuming my more laid-back development schedule in hiatus as I am a bit busier and want to still be spending time on immersion, so I hope this sates my users for the time being.

Which file should I download?

The files are split between the different device architectures to save user download bandwidth and storage space. Depending on which device you are using, download the appropriate APK by expanding the "Assets" drop-down menu below.

Test each APK available for each architecture. If you're not sure, the arm64 download should be suitable for most mobile devices.

Additionally, if you are having issues importing subtitles or dictionaries due to Android Q's enforcement of scoped storage, you may try the scoped storage branch. This branch is for users who are having issues loading external subtitles from the player menu, load by default will not work due to scoped storage limitations.