Mokuro: Read Japanese manga with selectable text inside a browser

I wonder if a label system like Gmail uses could work here. Then, should it be at the series level only, or also at the volume level? There’s a whole lot to spec out there for considering an implementation. (There’s also questions about where to store the tags and how indexable they should be for speed considerations.)

The first consideration here would be “what do you actually use”?

Looking at what Mokuro already has:

  • A-Z: Margially useful if you are looking for something (but good luck if you don’t know the sort order of kanji).
  • Z-A: Probably entirely useless.
  • Smart: I suspectt this is just “last read, then A-Z for the rest”, which I imagine is what most people would use.

On my Kobo e-reader, I use:

  • Last read
  • Last added

The latter is good for finding recently-added items that I want to start reading.

I know Mokuro Reader currently tracks some timestamps, but I’m not certain for which events and for which items.

Looking at the provided screenshot, it also includes:

  • Characters: I think Mokuro Reader exposes this information, but I’m not 100% certain
  • Last Update: How does this differ from “Added (id)”?
  • Progress: Is this series-level progress, or progress through the current volume you are reading? (What if you’re in the middle of multiple volumes for a series for reasons unknown?)

Yeah it can be tricky… there is no one right answer…I plan on doing a bunch of sorting of mokuro on the laptop and then probably have a better idea …

but ultimately I’d personally like a way to sort them by files/folders and group them however…

as one example… say all the adventure stuff in a folder/shelf…then within that shelf… maybe i sort them by type of series or by author… such that ultimately I have control of how I want to organize the mess…

Maybe I want to group all the BL together then break up sub groups in that own thing…and possibly then group a single mangaka into it’s own shelf … It’s not bad when there are 10 but when there are so many… gets messy fast when it’s just a bunch of books scrolling by…

There are some that I’d like to just collect by mangaka and shove into their own separate folder…and right now no real way to do that with the current mokuro-app.

Once I get it cleaned up and organized I’ll have a better idea of what works for me but basically full customization of organization so it not limited by title, or when it was read, … want to eat my cake too LOL …

this organizing thing is sooooo dang nice though!!! a whole two rows reduced to a square

edit:…after doing a few of these…some constructive thoughts…

an undo might be nice to have (at least for the most recent move - accidentally sending it to heck knows which book/series… :face_with_spiral_eyes:

the real important feature IMO is if someone is trying organize shall we say 13 vol of something…clicking through each one and each drop down one at a time then clicking back and having to scroll down…oof… would be nice to do 1, then click the rest of the vol and say add to this series at once instead of 1 by 1…

might have other thoughts as I use it more but these are the two big ones right now…

edit 2: more of a bug (not your problem but mentioning it…)
the new spine view alpha is pretty neat…but when you go back to the mokuro page it loses the view and goes back to default… looks like though we are going to be getting more customization options in the near future possibly…

what’s the discord? and were you able to figure out how to PR properly?

also, congrats on being featured in the tool ^^

The GitHub README page has a link:

Here are the steps I went through:

  1. Forked ZXY101’s repo.
  2. Rebased to Gnathonic’s repo. This is where development is occurring now that eventually migrates back to ZXY101’s repo.
    • If I were starting from scratch today, I would instead fork from Gnathonic’s repo to start with.
  3. Create a branch. Look at Gnathonic’s existing branches for naming examples. I’m trying to name branches such as:
    • feat/name-of-new-feature
    • enhance/name-of-enhancement
    • bugfix/name-of-bug-being-fixed
  4. Add/modify code.
  5. Push changes to my repo on GitHub.
  6. Option 1) View Gnathonic’s repo, and I get a button to do a pull request:
  7. Option 2) View my branch on my repo and use the Contribute button:
  8. From there, it’s just filling out the description and using the button to submit the PR.

Additional consideration: PR’s should go to the develop branch.

I just tried it and it worked well in Safari!

For those with fond memories of manga magazines with colored paper and ink (or want to try out the style), I’ve created a UserScript that gives a similar look in Mokuro Reader:

Sample images:

This is so nice!

for those of us that aren’t programmers…how do we change it to anything other than red?

The color is determined by an extremely simple algorithm such that:

  • Each manga appears in a different color.
  • The color changes roughly every 30 pages.

I don’t have an option to force a certain color (I can add one if you’d like).

If you’d prefer to have only one color, or to exclude a specific color, you can remove colors from the list here:

const COLORS = ["red", "orange", "yellow", "green", "blue", "violet", "pink"];

(Or you can shuffle them around.)

this is what I was missing… so it’s more semi randomized
thanks for clarifying!!!

having an option to pick from a menu would be a “nice to have” but not required

Only played with it a bit yesterday when reading, still not sure I like giving up the higher contrast for the color but was limited to only a couple of colors yesterday

for me personally if it could be a higher contrast (easier for reading) though would defeat the purpose/theme/intent of the whole thing …

This is wild! I never even knew I needed this, but o how I need it :grin:

Hello,
Which Python version are people using to run Mokuro?
I am on windows and it was working just fine for 2 years on Python 3.9 and now it stopped working, tried the latest python version but still not working
Thank you in advance for helping!

Edit: I was thinking, is it perhaps because I have multiple python version on my computer? I am not good with tech :sweat_smile:

The combination of Python 3.11.8 and Mokuro 0.2.4 is working fine for me.

But yeah, multiple version of Python can be a bitch to manage lol. Maybe have a look at pyenv? Then at least you know what version of Python you’re using for a given task.

Alternatively, post some error messages and we can have a look.

I have installed Mokuro 3.11.8 and I have python 3.13 for Anki
This is the same error I had previously
I have no idea what step did I mess up :thinking:

I have no idea why it says python 310 too

Look at the first line. Kanji in the folder path.

Now look at the end of the third line and beginning of the fourth line: ? where kanji would’ve been.

Could you try putting the files in a location with ‘normal’ English characters and trying again? You could always move them back later.

Bit of a hacky solution for now, but it would confirm that it’s a Unicode/UTF-8 issue.

Hm not sure that’s the correct troubleshooting, I’m not with my PC right now but I do have kanji in my folder names and it works, even though the CMD write ???

@WabiSabi175 Maybe I would look at the file structure instead, does the folder exist? Are there screenshots of the book in the specified folder?

might not the case but when you run the
mokuro command

mokuro “日本語の漫画”

only see one set of quotes in the screen shot

also helps a lot if you install python/mokuro into the path and then you can go directly into the folder you want to run w/o any drive:/ stuff

Do you run it via python maybe?

python -m mokuro “C:\Users\etc”

That could be the difference. I had a look and I read that pip’s .exe launcher sometimes has encoding issues.