mokuro

Read Japanese manga with selectable text inside a browser.

See demo: https://kha-white.github.io/manga-demo

^{Demo contains excerpt from Manga109-s dataset. うちの猫’ず日記 © がぁさん}

mokuro is aimed towards Japanese learners, who want to read manga in Japanese with a pop-up dictionary like Yomichan. It works like this:

1. Perform text detection and OCR for each page.
2. After processing a whole volume, generate a HTML file, which you can open in a browser.
3. All processing is done offline (before reading). You can transfer the resulting HTML file together with manga images to another device (e.g. your mobile phone) and read there.

mokuro uses comic-text-detector for text detection and manga-ocr for OCR.

Try running on your manga in Colab:

See also:

• Mokuro2Pdf, cli Ruby script to generate pdf files with selectable text from Mokuro's html overlay
• Xelieu's guide, a comprehensive guide on setting up a reading and mining workflow with manga-ocr/mokuro (and many other useful tips)

Installation

You need Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, or 3.10. As of April 2023, PyTorch unfortunately does not support Python 3.11 yet, see pytorch/pytorch#86566.

Some users have reported problems with Python installed from Microsoft Store. If you see an error: ImportError: DLL load failed while importing fugashi: The specified module could not be found., try installing Python from the official site.

If you want to run with GPU, install PyTorch as described here, otherwise this step can be skipped.

Run in command line:

pip3 install mokuro

Usage

Run on one volume

mokuro /path/to/manga/vol1

This will generate /path/to/manga/vol1.html file, which you can open in a browser.

If your path contains spaces, enclose it in double quotes, like this:

mokuro "/path/to/manga/volume 1"

Run on multiple volumes

mokuro /path/to/manga/vol1 /path/to/manga/vol2 /path/to/manga/vol3

For each volume, a separate HTML file will be generated.

Run on a directory containing multiple volumes

If your directory structure looks somewhat like this:

manga_title/
├─vol1/
├─vol2/
├─vol3/
└─vol4/

You can process all volumes by running:

mokuro --parent_dir manga_title/

Other options

--force_cpu - disable GPU
--as_one_file - generate separate css and js files instead of embedding everything in html
--disable_confirmation - run without asking for confirmation

Contact

For any inquiries, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]

Acknowledgments

• https://github.com/dmMaze/comic-text-detector
• https://github.com/juvian/Manga-Text-Segmentation