PanelView 🎬

A cinematic comic reader that runs entirely in your browser.

Drop in a .cbz, an image folder, or a Comic Sol project — and read it in three modes, including a Marvel-style Guided View where the camera glides from panel to panel.

▶ Live demo — click Try the demo comic, then press 3.

Why

Most web comic readers show you pages. PanelView shows you panels — with cinematic zoom-and-pan transitions, the way motion comics and official reader apps do it.

• Comic Sol projects: panel geometry is read straight from the project manifest, so guided framing is pixel-exact — no guessing.
• Any CBZ / image folder: automatic panel detection (gutter analysis on a canvas) with graceful fallback to full-page framing.

Features

• 📖 Page mode — classic single page, keyboard / swipe / click zones
• 📜 Webtoon mode — smooth vertical scroll
• 🎬 Guided mode — panel-by-panel cinematic camera with dimmed surroundings
• 🔒 100% client-side — no upload, no server, no tracking. Your files never leave your machine
• 📦 Zero dependencies, zero build — one HTML + one JS + one CSS; the ZIP reader is ~60 lines using the native DecompressionStream
• 💾 Resume where you left off (localStorage)
• 📱 Works on mobile (swipe, responsive UI)

Usage

Open the live demo or serve the folder locally:

git clone https://github.com/wenn-id/panelview
cd panelview
python3 -m http.server 8080   # any static server works

Then drop in:

Input	What happens
.cbz / .zip	Unzipped in-browser (stored + deflate), pages natural-sorted
Image folder	Natural-sorted pages
Comic Sol project folder	project.json + plan/storyboard.json detected → exact panel rects

Keys: ←/→/space navigate · 1/2/3 switch mode · f fullscreen · Esc close

Comic Sol integration

Comic Sol is an agent skill that turns a story prompt into a finished comic. Its projects carry deterministic panel geometry (fixed layout grammar, 1600×2400 pages). PanelView ports that layout math (layout_rects) to JS, so any Comic Sol output folder becomes a cinematic guided-view experience with zero configuration.

Tests

Open test.html in a browser (or via the static server). Assert-based checks for the ZIP parser, layout geometry parity, natural sort, and book detection — no framework.

Roadmap

• CBR (RAR) support
• PDF input
• Panel-order editor for correcting auto-detection
• Reading-direction (RTL / manga) toggle

License

MIT