Mokuro: Read Japanese manga with selectable text inside a browser

Nothing on that website will install anything on your PC, but you still need to process the files using my fork of mokuro before uploading them.

I’ve actually been running mokuro on Google Colab recently. I don’t know how the service is free or if its region locked, but it works great and actually seems faster than running it locally. Plus running it on colab means you don’t need to install mokuro on your machine. If you want to give it a try, I wrote up these instructions for my spouse to use (that link will take you to the Colab site).

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I think it needs mokuro’d files uploaded. At least if I’m reading this right:

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Hello :eyes:

Just wondering, how long does it usually take mokuro to run on one volume of a manga?
Cause mine looks like it has an estimated time of 9 hours and that just doesn’t feel right :eye::mouth::eye:

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For a 250-page volume running on a computer’s CPU, it shouldn’t take longer than maybe half an hour (unless your CPU came out in the 90’s).

Is it running on the CPU or GPU for you?

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Well that’s sad
It’s on CPU I’m not sure how to switch it I assume GPU would be faster

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More info on using the GPU:

Did you install PyTorch as described there? If installed correctly, it’s supposed to just use the GPU automatically. Unless you’re using Apple Silicon and running Mokuro inside of a Docker container (as I found out to my disappointment).

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How do you actually see if it runs on the CPU vs GPU?

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I believe it says “CPU” in one of the initial messages when it’s using the CPU.

And then for GPU, I believe it will always reference “CUDA”:

2025-06-07 08:50:17.570 | INFO | manga_ocr.ocr:init:13 - Loading OCR model from kha-white/manga-ocr-base
2025-06-07 08:50:20.162 | INFO | manga_ocr.ocr:init:19 - Using CUDA
2025-06-07 08:50:21.250 | INFO | manga_ocr.ocr:init:32 - OCR ready

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I’d assume it would show OpenCL or something for AMD cards

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Thank you for that, I was sure I did that when I first intalled mokuro, turns out I had some PATH problems going on and version mismatches

Its using GPU now and going much much faster! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Mine spits out a 50 line long dump of what I’m assuming is training data when it runs on GPU, so it’s very obvious to me. (It also does say CUDA).

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Interesting. Here’s what I get (in this case, running two folders through it):

2025-06-07 08:50:17.186 | INFO     | mokuro.run:run:43 - Processing 1/2: /home/chris/Books/Comics/Japanese/老女的少女ひなたちゃん (7)
Processing pages...:   0%|                                                                                  | 0/164 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
2025-06-07 08:50:17.220 | INFO     | mokuro.manga_page_ocr:__init__:30 - Initializing text detector
2025-06-07 08:50:17.570 | INFO     | manga_ocr.ocr:__init__:13 - Loading OCR model from kha-white/manga-ocr-base
2025-06-07 08:50:20.162 | INFO     | manga_ocr.ocr:__init__:19 - Using CUDA
2025-06-07 08:50:21.250 | INFO     | manga_ocr.ocr:__init__:32 - OCR ready
Processing pages...: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 164/164 [05:11<00:00,  1.90s/it]
2025-06-07 08:55:29.058 | INFO     | mokuro.run:run:43 - Processing 2/2: /home/chris/Books/Comics/Japanese/老女的少女ひなたちゃん (8)
Processing pages...: 100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 164/164 [05:05<00:00,  1.86s/it]
2025-06-07 09:00:34.258 | INFO     | mokuro.run:run:51 - Processed successfully: 2/2

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i think i’m just an idiot, i’ve followed the instructions and getting this

‘mokuro’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

okay, i need to run it from the python scripts folder?

now I’m just getting invalid path

okay, just copy the volumes into the script folder, I guess

You need to add the folder pip keeps its executables in to your windows PATH. Just run

python3 -m site --user-base

the folder the executables get downloaded to is the “Scripts” folder within that, something like

C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python311\Scripts

Search for “Environment Variables” on windows, and pick the “edit environment variables” result. Click on “Properties”, then “Environment variables”.

You should get a large list of these with their values. Find PATH (I’m pretty sure either user variables or global variables will work for this, but it might not be present in one of them), double click it, then add the above path you got to that. Restart your command line and it should allow you to run mokuro now.

Alternatively just do “python -m mokuro” instead, whichever you prefer.

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