Inspiration
As students who are studying other languages, we've often come across a frustrating situation: small, unreadable characters that cannot be deciphered even while zoomed in on it. The text is so unreadable that even for readers who know the language, it would be difficult for them to read. Yet, there are no easy solutions for this problem.
Whether you hate straining your eyes to read small text, have a reading disability, or want to translate text without having to play "Guess that Character!!!," this is the solution for you.
What it does
Our application extracts manga panels from Shonen Jump, enlarges the text for better readability, and displays all of the pages in a friendly, clean manga reader in a new tab without any distractions. All a user needs to do is click "Enlarge!"
How we built it
We built our front-end in JavaScript for it's ability to create working applications quickly and wrote our back-end in Python. We use a library called Manga OCR that identifies and outputs text whether it's horizontal or vertical in an image, no matter it's quality.
Challenges we ran into
- Accurately detecting text areas without distorting artwork
- Maintaining original panel aesthetics while enlarging dialogue
- Linking our back-end with our front-end
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Successfully enlarging text while mainly preserving artistic integrity
- Creating an intuitive, low-friction user experience
- Finishing a product that could go onto the Firefox Extension Store
What we learned
Drawing out the entire process at a high level helped us understand how to distribute work effectively and prevent us from forgetting what needs to be done next or what we're doing in the moment. When we came together to put our work in order, it was as seamless as it could be.
What's next for Manga Text Enlarger
We want to be able to support other popular manga sites as well as English. Once those features have been implemented, we want to branch out to enlarging other online media like comics or posters.
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