Web2Comics User Manual

Popup / Generator Wizard Overview

The popup is the main entry point from the extension toolbar icon. It contains the action launcher, the comic generator wizard, progress view, and a lightweight history modal.

Create Comic (Popup Generator Wizard)

Source Text

• Auto (full page): extracts readable page content from the current tab.
• My highlighted text: uses text you selected on the page.
• Re-scan: retries extraction.
• Extracted Source Text preview: verify what is used for generation.
• AI Input Preview: first 1,000 chars that are sent to storyboard generation.
• Article Section dropdown: appears when multiple extraction candidates are available.

Customize

Readiness and Generate

• The wizard shows readiness chips for Content, Provider, and Generate.
• Grounding Confidence appears before generation with High/Medium/Low guidance and an Auto-pick best story section action.
• The Generate Comic button is disabled until content and provider settings are ready.
• The readiness box explains what to fix and can provide a Fix next step shortcut.
• When full-page extraction fails, selection fallback guidance is shown with quick actions (Show Selection Hint, Retry Full Page).

Popup Progress View

After generation starts, Web2Comics can attempt to open the side panel while the popup shows progress (Chrome may block auto-open unless it is triggered by a direct user gesture).

• Status text: current phase (storyboard or image rendering).
• Progress bar: panel-level completion progress.
• Panel progress list: per-panel statuses such as Pending, Sent, Receiving, Rendering, Completed.
• Debug progress log (when debug flag is enabled): prompt/response step entries.
• Cancel: requests cancellation of the current generation job.

Popup My Collection

The popup history modal is a quick-access list of previously generated comics.

• Shows recent items with thumbnails and source metadata.
• Each item has an individual Delete action (with confirmation).
• Useful when you want to reopen a comic quickly without opening the side panel browser.
• The full browsing experience is available in the side panel My Collection view.

Options / Settings Overview

The Options page manages defaults, providers, prompt templates, local storage, and general extension information.

Options: General

Generation Defaults

• Default Panel Count: starting value used in popup.
• Detail Level: default storyboard detail level.
• Default Output Language: default language used for captions and narrative text.
• Default Style: default art style preset or saved custom style for new generations.
• Custom Style Name / Description: shown when creating a new reusable custom style entry from Options.
• Caption Length: preferred caption length for generated panels.

If you choose Custom... in Default Style, the inline custom-style editor appears with a Create Style button. After creating a style, it is selected in the list and the inline editor is hidden again.

Free-tier-first default setup: Web2Comics starts with Google Gemini selected for both text and image generation (when eligible/configured), plus a low-cost default generation profile (fewer panels and lower detail) to maximize the chance that a first run succeeds on free-tier limits.

Behavior

• Automatically open comic viewer after generation: attempts to open the side panel on completion (Chrome may block auto-open without a user gesture).
• Enable character consistency mode: provider hint to keep characters visually consistent across panels.
• Debug flag: shows detailed provider/panel errors and enables richer local debugging behavior.

Image Generation → Content Filtering Handling

Controls what happens when an image provider blocks a panel prompt.

• Show "Rewritten" badge: marks panels that succeeded after a retry rewrite/sanitize pass.
• Log original + rewritten prompt locally: stores prompt details in local debug logs/panel metadata for troubleshooting.

Options: Providers

Configure and validate provider credentials. Web2Comics supports mixed-provider setups and provider-specific model selection for both text and image generation where available.

Provider Cards

• Google Gemini: text + image generation.
• Cloudflare Workers AI: text + image generation (account-scoped auth).
• OpenRouter: text + image generation (image support depends on your OpenRouter account/model availability and may route/fallback to a different backend model).
• Hugging Face Inference API: text + image generation (chat for text, hf-inference image tasks for images).
• OpenAI: text + image generation (GPT + DALL-E).

Validation

• Use each provider card’s Validate button after entering credentials (buttons show a spinner while waiting).
• Web2Comics persists provider validation state in local storage and uses it to gate popup provider visibility/readiness.
• If a selected provider fails due to quota/budget/billing limits during generation, Web2Comics can automatically fall back to other configured providers (free-tier-first) for text and/or image generation.
• Google Gemini is the default first-run provider because it can cover both text and image generation with one key, but free-tier availability depends on Google account/project eligibility and region.

OpenAI Model / Speed Controls

Options: Prompts

Prompt templates let you customize storyboard and image prompts per provider scope.

Current support

• Provider scopes in the UI: OpenAI, Google Gemini, Cloudflare Workers AI, OpenRouter, and Hugging Face.
• Runtime template consumption (current build): provider templates are consumed for all configured providers during storyboard/image generation flows.
• Template types: Storyboard and Image.
• Prompt Library presets can be applied by use-case group to current provider or all providers.
• You can import prompt-library presets from a JSON array using Import Prompt Library JSON. Imported presets are saved and available in future sessions.

Validation behavior

• Required placeholder checks prevent invalid saves.
• Unknown placeholder warnings are shown but can be used for future expansion.

Common placeholders

• Storyboard: {{source_title}}, {{source_url}}, {{panel_count}}, {{detail_level}}, {{objective}}, {{objective_label}}, {{objective_guidance}}, {{output_language}}, {{output_language_label}}, {{output_language_instruction}}, {{style_prompt}}, {{content}}
• Image: {{panel_caption}}, {{panel_summary}}, {{style_prompt}}, {{panel_index}}, {{panel_count}}, {{output_language}}, {{output_language_label}}, {{output_language_instruction}}

Options: Storage

• Storage Usage: shows history count and rough storage data indicators.
• Maximum Cache Size: intended cap for local image/cache data handling.
• History Retention: target retention duration in days.
• Clear History: removes saved comics history.
• Clear Image Cache: clears cached image data (if used by current build).
• Export All Data: exports extension storage to JSON.
• Export Debug Logs: exports local debug logs to JSON.
• Google Drive Backup (Optional): connect OAuth and auto-save generated comics as interactive HTML into Drive folder MyComics.
• Connections (Optional): Google Drive, Facebook, and X use built-in OAuth flows; additional share-target connection toggles exist for Instagram and other targets such as LinkedIn, Reddit, and Email.

Options: About

Displays product/version information and informational links. This is also the safest place to confirm branding and extension identity when testing multiple local builds.

Comic Viewer Side Panel Overview

The side panel is the main viewing surface for generated comics, in-progress generation, and historical browsing.

The header also shows live viewer counters for generated comics, panels, pages processed, and current local storage usage.

Side Panel: Comic View

Display modes

• Strip View: horizontal comic strip layout.
• Carousel: focused panel view with thumbnails.
• Panel View: grid/list view of all panels.

Layout Presets

Web2Comics includes a broad layout preset library (for example Single panel, 4-panel grid, Classic comic page, Manga page, Webtoon scroll, Masonry, Guided path, and Carousel). In the current implementation, presets are fully functional layout/view variants built on the side panel render engines and preset-specific styling rules.

Download Export

• Exports a single composite PNG image using the currently selected layout preset.
• Includes source title, source URL, source short-name (for example cnn), panel thumbnails, captions, and attribution line Made with Web2Comics.

Per-panel controls

• Regenerate panel, Regenerate caption, Make more factual, and Make simpler run scoped panel edits without rerunning the whole comic.
• Facts used blocks (when available) show entities, dates, numbers, and source snippet grounding.
• Jump to source opens the source and copies the source snippet for quick verification.

Policy handling indicators

• Rewritten panel succeeded after prompt rewrite/sanitization retry.
• Blocked panel is a provider-policy placeholder panel.
• View prompt button appears when debugging is enabled and prompt logging metadata is available.

Side Panel: Generation View

• Shows a comic-like placeholder shell during generation.
• Uses live panel statuses: Pending, Sent, Receiving, Rendering, Completed, Error.
• Matches the currently selected view mode/layout preset for continuity.
• Cancel stops the active job and shows a Canceling... state while cancellation is being processed.

Side Panel: My Collection

• Dedicated browsing grid of previous comics.
• Cards include source short name and Original link.
• Keyboard support: tab focus, Enter/Space to open, tablist navigation for primary view tabs.
• Chunked loading with Show More for larger histories.

Appendix: How to Obtain Provider Keys / Tokens

Use local-only storage (Options page or local env files for tests). Do not commit secrets to git.

OpenAI (API Key)

1. Open the OpenAI Platform API keys page: platform.openai.com/api-keys
2. Sign in to the correct organization/project.
3. Create a new secret key.
4. Copy the key immediately (you may not be able to view it again).
5. In Web2Comics Options → Providers → OpenAI, paste it and click Validate.

Reference: OpenAI Help: Where do I find my API key?

Google Gemini (Google AI Studio API Key)

1. Open Google AI Studio: aistudio.google.com
2. Open the API key page (Get API key / API keys).
3. Select or create the correct Google Cloud project.
4. Enable the Generative Language API for that project if prompted.
5. Create an API key.
6. Paste it into Web2Comics Options → Providers → Google Gemini and click Validate.

References:

• Gemini API docs: API keys
• Gemini API docs: rate limits / free tier notes

Cloudflare Workers AI (Account ID + API Token)

1. Sign in to Cloudflare Dashboard: dash.cloudflare.com
2. Get your Account ID (Dashboard sidebar/account overview area).
3. Create an API token with access to Workers AI / AI inference for that account.
4. (Recommended) Use token auth instead of global key + email.
5. For E2E tests, store CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID and CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN in local env.
6. For extension runtime, configure Cloudflare credentials in the build/runtime path used by your current test setup.

Reference: Cloudflare Workers AI documentation

OpenRouter (API Key)

1. Open OpenRouter keys page: openrouter.ai/keys
2. Create a new API key.
3. Copy the key and paste into Web2Comics Options → Providers → OpenRouter.
4. Click Validate.
5. Optional but recommended: test OpenRouter text and image models from the provider card using Test Text Model / Test Image Model because model availability varies by account and route.

Reference: OpenRouter Quickstart

Hugging Face Inference API (User Access Token)

1. Sign in to Hugging Face: huggingface.co
2. Open your access tokens page: huggingface.co/settings/tokens
3. Create a token with appropriate inference permissions.
4. Copy the token and paste into Web2Comics Options → Providers → Hugging Face.
5. Click Validate.
6. Select Hugging Face text and image models in the provider card (image generation uses Hugging Face hf-inference image endpoints).

Reference: Hugging Face Inference documentation

Testing Keys Locally (E2E)

For local E2E testing, Web2Comics supports loading secrets from a git-ignored file such as .env.e2e.local.

OPENAI_API_KEY=...
GEMINI_API_KEY=...
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=...
HUGGINGFACE_INFERENCE_API_TOKEN=...
CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID=...
CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN=...