Comics on a small screen read balloon to balloon and panel to panel, instead of by pinching around a page built for print. Open a CBZ from the Bookshelf and both are ready.

The balloon index

When a comic opens, the app finds the speech balloons on every page, in the background, and remembers them. Page turns stay instant because nothing is detected at turn time. Three things follow from how this works:

• It indexes balloons, not panels. A wrong panel crop is worse than no crop; a missed balloon is survivable. The detector’s panel guesses are deliberately ignored.
• A page that fails to index does not break the book. You lose that page’s balloon jumps and nothing else, and the tally is honest about it.
• The index is a local cache, not synced. Each device indexes its own copy the first time the book opens there.

CBZ only. CBR archives are skipped.

The panel walk

Each comic has its own settings, kept per book: panel mode, reading direction, zoom and flow. Direction is the one thing that cannot be guessed — manga reads right to left — so set it once and the walk keeps it. In panel mode, tap or page to step to the next panel; the reader remembers which panel you stood on when you come back.

Long-hold on a page

Hold on a comic page and the app captures what is on screen — the panel, a box you draw, or the whole page — labeled “Page 3 of 20 · panel 2”. Then:

• Read aloud the text in that crop.
• Save it to your photo library, for use outside Ledgable.
• Pick it onto today’s page, with a link back to the book and the page.

Finishing

Finishing a comic offers the next chapter in the same folder, and with the library hub the next two chapters fetch themselves ahead of you. See Reading across devices.

On e-ink

Balloon detection is the cost you pay once per book; after that the reader does only what a page turn needs. A six-inch device is the case this was built for.

Credits

The balloon detector is the one from the Seeneva comic reader, used with attribution. See Credits and licenses.