FRANK Scanlation

A Kindle-like desktop reader for ad-hoc scanlation websites.
Paste a site URL, get a library card with cover art, chapter tracking, and new-chapter notifications. Read on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

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What it looks like

Your library: paste a site URL, get a card with cover art, reading status, and a NEW badge when unread chapters land.

Reading: the site opens in place with the Prettify Manga Reader overlay injected — here a double-page spread, fitted to a maximized window, with the ⌂ Library button to get back home.

What it is

Scanlation sites are ad-bloated, bright, one-long-scroll pages. This app is the third member of a small family:

• prettify-manga-reader — a browser extension that overlays a dark, page-fitted, spread-joining reader on top of those sites.
• FRANK MANGA+ — a Tauri desktop client for the official MANGA Plus service.
• FRANK Scanlation (this repo) — the two combined: a Tauri desktop app whose reader windows load scanlation sites directly and inject the extension's reader into every page.

Nothing is hardcoded to any website. The same heuristics the extension uses (image-sequence scoring, chapter-number families in URLs, conservative next/previous-chapter detection) drive everything here, on both sides of the fence:

• JS side (desktop/src-tauri/injected/reader.js, injected into reader windows): detects the manga pages, builds the dark overlay with Single/Double/Book spreads, night filter, keyboard navigation, and end-of-chapter next/prev cards. It auto-opens on chapter-looking URLs.
• Rust side (core/): parses chapter numbers out of navigated URLs to track reading progress, and extracts title/cover/chapter list from a site's HTML when you add it or when the background checker polls it.

Features

• Library grid with cover art pulled from each site (og:image and friends), reading status, and a NEW badge when unread chapters exist.
• Add by URL: paste something like https://zom-100-bucket-list-of-the-dead.online/ and the title, cover, and latest chapter are extracted automatically.
• Continue ▶ opens the chapter after the last one you read (the chapter list is refetched on the fly); falls back to where you left off.
• Progress tracking without site cooperation: the reader window is a real webview pointed at the site; Rust watches its page loads and records chapter numbers parsed from the URLs. Remote pages get no IPC access.
• Background new-chapter checks shortly after launch and every 6 hours, with desktop notifications.
• Reader (injected on every page): Space/arrows to flip pages/spreads, D cycles Single → Double → Book, N cycles the night filter, S toggles scroll snap, Enter/Backspace jump chapters, ? for help. Mode choice is remembered per manga.
• Reading protections: while a manga is open, the window refuses top-level navigations that leave the manga's own domains (killing ad redirects and popunders at the navigation layer), window.open is disabled on reading pages, and freshly-injected full-screen overlay ads get hidden. Deliberately minimal — the sites themselves are untouched.
• MangaDex support: the one host-gated exception to the pure heuristics (same stance as the browser extension). MangaDex is an API-driven SPA, so title/cover/chapter-list, reading progress, and prev/next chapter all go through its public API — English by default. Paste a mangadex.org/title/… (or chapter) URL like any other site.

Where data lives

OS	Path
Linux	~/.config/frank-scanlation/ (honors XDG_CONFIG_HOME)
macOS	~/.config/frank-scanlation/
Windows	%APPDATA%\frank-scanlation\

library.db is the SQLite library; covers/ holds downloaded cover art. Reader-mode preferences live in each site's localStorage inside the webview.

Layout

core/                     scanlation-core: heuristics, HTML extraction,
                          SQLite library, HTTP fetcher (no Tauri deps)
desktop/                  SvelteKit (bun) frontend — the library grid
desktop/src-tauri/        Tauri 2 app: commands, reader windows,
                          background checker
desktop/src-tauri/injected/  reader.js + reader.css injected into reader
                          windows (ported from the browser extension)

Development

# Rust tests + lints
cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --lib --tests -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check

# Frontend unit tests + injected-reader tests (node:vm harness)
cd desktop
bun install
bun run test

# Run the app
bun run tauri dev

# Release bundles for the host platform
bun run tauri build

CI / Releases

GitHub Actions mirror the FRANK MANGA+ setup:

• ci.yml — tests, clippy, rustfmt, vitest + node tests, frontend build on Linux/macOS/Windows.
• release.yml — tag v* builds Linux (AppImage/deb/rpm), macOS (Apple Silicon, signed + notarized), and Windows (NSIS/MSI) bundles and publishes a GitHub release. Requires these repository secrets for macOS: APPLE_CERTIFICATE, APPLE_CERTIFICATE_PASSWORD, APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY, APPLE_ID, APPLE_PASSWORD, APPLE_TEAM_ID (optional: TAURI_SIGNING_PRIVATE_KEY, TAURI_SIGNING_PRIVATE_KEY_PASSWORD).
• aur-publish.yml — publishes frank-scanlation-bin to the AUR after a release. Requires AUR_USERNAME, AUR_EMAIL, AUR_SSH_PRIVATE_KEY.

App icons are generated from docs/icon.png — after changing it, rerun bunx tauri icon ../docs/icon.png from desktop/.

Disclaimer

Personal-use reader. It doesn't host, proxy, or rehost any content — the reader windows load the sites you point them at, ads and all; the overlay is cosmetic and local. Support the official releases of the manga you read.

License

MIT.