Guided panel reading ​

The reader can walk a page panel by panel — the view zooms to the first panel, dims everything around it, and each tap or key press moves to the next panel in reading order. On a phone or tablet, where a full page is small, it turns dense pages into something you can actually read.

Using guided view ​

Open any issue in the reader and press G (or the panel-grid button in the toolbar). The camera frames the first panel; advancing works exactly like page turns — tap the right edge, arrow keys, or space. When the last panel finishes, the next page begins at its first panel; going backward enters a page at its last panel, so the flow stays natural in both directions.

• A spotlight dims everything outside the current panel — including along slanted borders when a panel isn't rectangular.
• Right-to-left series tour panels in manga order automatically.
• Pages without a confident layout (splashes, covers, heavy collage art) show as a normal full page inside guided view — advancing just turns the page. A clean full page always beats a broken tour.
• Turning guided view off (press G again) returns to normal reading instantly.

How panels are detected ​

The first time an issue is opened for guided view, the server detects every page's panel layout once, in the background, and caches it — you'll see live progress ("Detecting panels… 12/44 pages"), and after that it's instant. Detection runs entirely on your server; pages are never uploaded anywhere.

Detection is deliberately conservative: when it isn't confident about a page, it serves the whole page rather than guessing. Art that bleeds across gutters, borderless panels, and experimental layouts are the usual reasons a page stays in page mode — and those are exactly the pages the panel editor exists for.

The panel editor ​

Users with the Edit panel layouts permission (admin tier by default — grant it to trusted roles in Settings → Users) get an Edit panel layout action on every owned issue. It opens a full-issue editor:

• A thumbnail rail shows every page with its panel count; filter chips jump to pages with no layout, edited pages, or unreviewed pages.
• Drag a panel to move it; drag its corners to resize. Double-tap a panel to unlock its corners for slanted panels (double-tap again to square it back).
• Draw a new panel by dragging on empty page area — or click empty area to place a polygon corner by corner for angled shapes.
• Snap magnetizes edges onto the drawn panel borders, so rough drags become exact layouts (toggle Auto-snap off to place panels exactly where you draw them).
• Set order renumbers panels by tapping them in reading sequence; Preview plays the guided tour in place so you can check it before saving.
• Undo/redo, copy/paste a layout between pages, keyboard nudging, and a Whole page button for pages that should just read whole.
• Review mode is the fast path for checking a whole issue: Space confirms each page's layout and advances; fix anything that's wrong along the way. Confirmed pages get a ✓ in the rail.

Edits are saved per file and apply to everyone on your server. They outrank whatever detection says — including future, smarter detectors — and each page can be reverted to automatic detection independently.

The shared panel cache ​

Detecting a page that some other BackIssue server has already detected is wasted work — so servers can share layouts through a community cache, keyed by a fingerprint of each page's content:

• Before detecting, your server asks the cache; pages it already knows come back instantly.
• Layouts your server's ML detector finds, and any hand-corrections your users make, are contributed back for everyone else (the built-in fallback detector's output stays local — only high-quality layouts enter the pool).
• Hand-corrections always outrank detector output. A model-detected layout is only served to others once two servers independently agree on it.

What leaves your server: panel rectangles and a hash of each page's image bytes — never the images themselves, never filenames, never titles. The hash lets identical pages match without revealing what they are. If you'd rather not participate at all, turn off Share panel layouts with the community cache in Settings → Library; detection then runs purely locally.

Settings ​

Known limits ​

• Pages where art crosses the panel borders (bleeds) or with heavily overlapping/diagonal layouts often fall back to page mode — fix them in the panel editor if you want them toured.
• Detection quality keeps improving; corrections made in the editor are never overwritten by upgrades.