# Manga Translator OCR Pipeline

A robust manga/comic OCR + translation pipeline with:

- EasyOCR (default, reliable on macOS M1)
- Optional PaddleOCR (auto-fallback if unavailable)
- Bubble clustering and line-level boxes
- Robust reread pass (multi-preprocessing + slight rotation)
- Translation export + debug overlays

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## ✨ Features

- OCR from raw manga pages
- Noise filtering (`BOX` debug artifacts, tiny garbage tokens, symbols)
- Speech bubble grouping
- Reading order estimation (`ltr` / `rtl`)
- Translation output (`output.txt`)
- Structured bubble metadata (`bubbles.json`)
- Visual debug output (`debug_clusters.png`)

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## 🧰 Requirements

- macOS (Apple Silicon supported)
- Python **3.11** recommended
- Homebrew (for Python install)

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## 🚀 Setup (Python 3.11 venv)

```bash
cd /path/to/manga-translator

# 1) Create venv with 3.11
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3.11 -m venv venv

# 2) Activate
source venv/bin/activate

# 3) Verify interpreter
python -V
# expected: Python 3.11.x

# 4) Install dependencies
python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

# Optional Paddle runtime
python -m pip install paddlepaddle || true