OCR Manga Reader for Android / Tickets / #11 Some suggestions

Are you me lol? I emailed (what I thought was the email address of) the dev 2 years ago about these exact features haha (see attached). I never got any response from him until I posted here, though, and at that point I watered down my request quite a bit to make it easier on him (ticket #5), although the use case was the same.

I will say that, with the feature that was implemented in ticket #5, one current workaround if you're willing to make your anki cards later e.g. after syncing with your computer, and you don't mind using either a tsv/csv reading tool or doing it manually, is to follow the instructions on the website (reproduced below with some edits for clarity) for saving your OCR results to a word list:

Tap Settings > OCR > Misc > Word List Save File Path and select an existing .txt or .tsv file.

Configure the format of the saved entries by tapping Settings > OCR > Misc > Word List Save File Format. You can select from any combination of the following choices:

Entire Selection
Expression
Reading
Definition
Frequency

The next time you OCR a word, you may tap the Send button, and then select Word List Save File from the list of destinations.

Before doing this you'll have to prepare a blank txt/tsv file, e.g. named wordList.txt, in advance, somewhere on your phone you can reach easily (preferably not somewhere that requires root access).

Since I definitely still support the features you're suggesting being added, though, and since I'm not sure if the dev ever even saw my original emails, I'll also copy and paste the text from the attached email screenshots for posterity. It's basically the same as what you said, so there's no need to read it all unless you're interested.

Hello!

I just started using your app, and there are a few features that I'd be happy to donate $50 to your project for if you'd add them. I was really hoping the app had the ability to send the entire highlighted selection to Ankidroid, since I (and I think most people these days) learn words by using the entire sentence context that I found the word in. This is similar to Yomichan (which finds the actual sentence, using linebreaks and punctuation), except I think just using the highlighted text would be simplest.

I'd also like to request, if possible, the option for taking a screenshot of the current view (with the text highlighted perhaps) and use that when sending text to Anki. Right now all I can do is take a picture of the screen before sending the card to anki, and then add that to the new card. This is messy because the definitions get in the way if I'm highlighting the text, and otherwise, after confirming the word, I need to exit the OCR mode, take the screenshot, and then go back into OCR mode before adding the card. This is very clunky and even slower than simply copying the text to the clipboard and sending it to Ankidroid manually would be.

So I'm imagining the following fields being sent to Anki:

Sentence (entire highlighted text)
Expression (the single word you want, as it is now)
Definition (definition of the word)
Image (screenshot with the highlighted text in the shot but ideally without the definitions interface showing, so that you can easily see where in the picture you were looking when you go back to view the picture)

Lastly, if it's simple to do, I like to request that pdfs be openable with the app. Right now I need to convert my pdfs to images in order to read them.

Thanks again for making this app! Of course you're free to add these features or not; they're just suggestions.

Hi!

I noticed you updated the ocr manga reader app a few months ago, so I thought I'd just reiterate my support and beg you again for these features. Details are in my previous email.

The ability to additionally/simultaneously send the entire selection to Anki (eg the automatically selected sentence on top of the currently selected word) for context.
Native support for pdfs
The ability to simultaneously send a screenshot to Anki.

Up to you of course - I'm just happy to see you're alive! You're really the unspoken hero of the Japanese language learning community.

By the way, I'm not sure if this is fixed in a newer version, but I can't send to a word list. I've set the file path to an existing blank .txt file, and I tried saving it in various locations, but when I click the send button nothing happens, no matter how much I click it or how much I wait. When I open the .txt file to see if anything was written, it's blank.

Actually, instead of exporting the entire selection to Anki, being able to have that saved to the word list is all I need.
So just adding an option like:
Sentence/Entire Selection [tab] Expression [tab] Reading [tab] Definition
would be awesome if you could do it! Then it would be just like Kindle's Vocabulary Builder function (basically the only thing making me consider buying a kindle).

The pdf thing can be circumvented by converting with calibre, and the screenshot thing is just a minor annoyance. This is the real feature I can't live without (i.e. haven't been able to live without for the past year)

And then I ended up opening ticket #5 a couple weeks after this last email.

Since due to Ankidroid's terrible addon integration I switched my entire anki workflow to a windows tablet with an android emulator a while back, I'm personally now wanting PDF support a lot more than smoother Ankidroid integration, but the latter seems like it can be implemented pretty quickly comparatively, so fingers crossed on all your suggestions.

Cheers.