#123 Webcomic mode? (Plus different config sets)

[JMA]

Hello, I have two requests that I think would be really cool to have. The first one is to have a 'webcomic' mode, also known as 'continuous mode', where we can just scroll down and down indefinitely as if it were a single image, joining all the pictures in the file, since webcomics are packed this way and otherwise are cumbersome to read. Horizontal margins between each picture should have a value to set them from zero to whatever, but zero is necessary so that the pictures are joined effectively.

The second feature suggestion would be to have a 'set' of default configs that we could create so we could just use them when we open different files. For example, one for manga, one for comics, one for webcomics, etc, so that we change the config and then save it in a config called 'webcomic' or whatever, 'my config 1', and then we can choose from the different configs we have.

Thank you very much for the work!

[FeRD]

@aaku asked me to butt in here.

@JMA wrote....

Horizontal margins between each picture should have a value to set them from zero to whatever, but zero is necessary so that the pictures are joined effectively.

*Vertical margins. (Top & bottom.) Just so that everyone's clear on the intention.

Here's what a proper webtoon/infinity mode for MComix would look like. (I'm using "webtoon" because it's one of the biggest sites publishing this format, and because "webcomic" has a definition going back decades to just mean "any comic strip published on the web". "Infinity comic" is just Marvel's trademark name for their implementation of the webtoon format.)

• Files in the archive would be arranged in a vertical stack, single-width only (no dual-page mode)
• Each file is placed immediately and directly below the previous, with no visible separation or division between the images. There's no reason to offer any options or control over that; seamless zero-margin joining is the only correct/sensible presentation.
• Scrolling would be continuous, only. If there must be "next/previous page" controls, or if the user types PgUp or PgDn, that would advance the scroll position in the corresponding direction by the height of the viewport, same as scrolling any longer-than-the-screen-height webpage. Exactly like an HTML page, a webtoon is just one, single, potentially-very-long page.
• Because it's a single "page", there's no internal concept of "pages" at all — webtoons do not have multiple, individual pages, even if they're stored (and they always are) as multiple image files. The files in the archive make up a continuous comic "stream", chopped into pieces for simple efficiency, nothing more. (An online viewer can load the chunks incrementally as the user scrolls.) But the divisions between images can fall anywhere — even right in the middle of a panel. (Which is why seamless joining is so important. And why the fifth file in the archive is in NO way, shape, or form, "page 5". It is simply the fifth section of the single page.)

...Now, as for how that might be implemented.

Stored settings profiles is an interesting idea, but I think it would require quite a lot of development. It'd need someone interested in putting in the (not-inconsiderable) effort.

And I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, as part of this request. Like I outlined above, a webtoon mode is pretty narrowly defined — there aren't a lot of choices for how it can work, there's just how it should work.

It seems to me like it could probably be done as a new viewing mode, the same way MComix already has best-fit, fit-to-width, and all the other zoom modes, and then also has the two-page and manga-mode options. Actually, most specifically those latter two.

In my view, "Webtoon Mode" could exist as a third option next to the existing Manga and Two-Page modes -- it would necessarily be mutually exclusive with both of those.

The zoom preferences would still be useful, because scaling a webtoon presentation on a landscape-aspect screen is very much a matter of taste. They're geared towards portrait phone displays, where the only sensible zoom option is to scale it to the device width. But on a desktop/laptop screen, you're gonna want to have a choice in how wide the comic is rendered, since it will control how much height you can see at once.

So, in my view that'd be it. You load an archive containing an Infinity Comic / Webtoon, whatever viewing mode you were previously in, you hit the Webtoon button to switch over. It deactivates Manga and/or Two-Page modes (stashing away their previous state to restore it later), and maybe switches the zoom mode to a separate one that's stored just for webtoon mode, most likely different from your normal-viewing zoom. (I normally read comics in two-up, fit-to-screen mode, but that's unlikely to be the zoom I want for webtoon reading.)

I don't even think there has to be any explicit way to configure "the webtoon zoom". I think MComix could just keep track of whatever zoom setting you use when webtoon mode is active, and whatever zoom setting you use when it isn't active, both separately, and then automatically switch between them whenever you activate/deactivate the mode. Once someone settles on a zoom preference, it's almost certainly going to be the one they want for every webtoon-style comic — there's little reason to think a particular webtoon would need a different viewing configuration than all the others.

When you're finished reading webtoon-format presentations and you want to go back to your traditional-comic view settings, you just hit the webtoon-mode button again to DE-activate it, and it restores whatever Manga, Two-Page, and Zoom settings you had active when it was activated. (Of course, you can always deactivate it by hitting one of the other viewing-mode buttons, but then you'll activate only that mode. IOW, say you were in Two-Page Manga mode, and you activate Webtoon Mode. If you hit the Webtoon Mode button again, you'll be back in Two-Page Manga mode automatically. But if you're in Webtoon Mode and you hit the Two-Page button to exit, you'll be in Two-Page mode without Manga enabled.)

Does that all make sense? Does anyone have any concerns or feel I've overlooked / misinterpreted anything?

[Ark]

@ferd617 Sorry for the confusion. Here on SF, different kind of tickets are numbered independently. Specifically, I was talking about [bugs:#123], not [feature-requests:#123]. You might want to re-read my message. I hope this clears things up.

[FeRD]

Ah, crap. Well, it's good I got all that down anyway, I guess! 😆

[Athanasios Kanellopoulos]

If the project maintainers are open to the idea, I am happy to sponsor development for the "continuous mode" (the implementation as described by JMA and FeRD; a new view option given to the user).
I pledge $600 (USD) if this feature can be shipped within 2026 at the latest.