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Paste Overlays ​

Besides writing translations into text regions, typesetting often needs to place cut-out image assets on the page: hand-written characters, SFX, stamps, stickers, or background patches borrowed from another page. Text regions are a poor fit for that, so previously people composited such assets outside the editor and pasted the finished page back. The editor's paste overlay object covers this use case: drop an image asset (PNG/JPG/WebP/etc.) straight onto the canvas and edit its position, size, rotation, opacity and stacking independently, with the result persisted per page and baked into exports.

What it does ​

  • Dropping supported image assets (PNG/JPG/WebP/BMP/TIFF/AVIF, etc.) creates a page-level overlay centered at the drop point, selected immediately; oversized assets (edge > 2048 px) are scaled down automatically.
  • Once selected, editing follows the same habits as text regions: move / corner uniform resize / top rotation / hover cursors; Ctrl+Wheel scales uniformly, Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V copy & paste, Delete removes, Ctrl+Z undoes.
  • Each change (move/resize/rotate/add/remove) is an undoable command.
  • Overlays are persisted with the page (see Storage below) and restored when reopening; export composites them into the final image at the same position/size/orientation as shown on the canvas, below rendered text.
  • Pages containing only overlays (no text regions) still export correctly, preserving transparency for transparent PNG assets.

Editing in the editor ​

Adding an overlay ​

  1. Open the editor and load a manga page.
  2. Drag an image from Explorer onto the canvas and release — it lands where you drop it.
  3. Alternatively copy an existing overlay by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+C, then press Ctrl+V to paste a copy at the mouse position.

Overlays and text regions do not interfere: clicking an overlay selects the overlay, clicking a text region selects the region; clicking empty canvas or a text region dismisses the overlay handles.

Editing the selected overlay ​

The selected overlay shows the same decorations as text regions:

  • Dashed border marks the selection;
  • Corner squares: drag to scale uniformly around the overlay center;
  • Top ring: drag to rotate around the center;
  • Hovering the corner/rotation handles switches the cursor to diagonal-resize / move, so the draggable areas are discoverable;
  • Dragging the body moves the overlay;
  • Ctrl+Wheel = uniform scaling (same entry point as the text-region font-size wheel: with no region selected it applies to the overlay);
  • Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V = copy / paste (overlay clipboard is independent from the region clipboard);
  • Delete removes the selected overlay.

For shortcuts and focus rules see Shortcuts; canvas tools, selection, zoom and pan see Canvas tools and selection.

Saving and export behavior ​

Storage format ​

Overlays are stored alongside page regions in the page's *_translations.json:

jsonc
"paste_overlays": [{
  "id": "…",
  "name": "…",
  "z": 0, "visible": true, "opacity": 1.0,
  "center_x": 0.0, "center_y": 0.0,   // source-image pixel coordinates
  "width": 0.0, "height": 0.0,
  "rotation": 0.0, "flip_h": false, "flip_v": false,
  "image": "<base64 PNG, RGBA>"
}]
  • Images are embedded as base64 PNG (RGBA), like mask_raw / paint_overlay / stamp_overlay, so a page stays self-contained and portable;
  • Old page files without paste_overlays load fine (treated as empty);
  • Geometry is expressed in source-image pixels; the canvas preview and backend export share the same coordinate space.

Export and backend ​

  • Editor "export" composites overlays in ascending z order over the base image with premultiplied-alpha source-over (no darkened or bleeding edges), below rendered text;
  • Pages with overlays but no text regions/mask export correctly, including RGBA output for transparent PNG assets;
  • CLI/Web loading from disk JSON reads paste_overlays and materializes them so results match the desktop export.

Limitations and roadmap ​

  • Overlays are edited as single objects for now (no multi-select/align/distribute); stacking is controlled by the z field;
  • Overlays and text regions use separate object types and selection state; unifying them fully (shared property panel, multi-select batch operations, common geometry-handle pipeline) would be a model-layer change and is open for discussion;
  • Oversized or malformed project files are defensively skipped (including a pre-decode pixel-size check) to keep exports from exhausting memory.