Allow uploaders to set first page of a chapter to be either solo or not solo

[vigorousjammer]

Currently, when reading in two-page format, a lot of chapters start with the first page being placed on the wrong side, and every subsequent page being on the side opposite of where they should be.
The person reading the chapter can fix this manually by holding shift and using the arrow keys, but what if the uploader was able to set if the first page should be shown in two-page format or on it's own. This would fix the left/right page placement of the rest of the chapter, and alleviate the reader from having to manually adjust anything.

I would perhaps suggest not showing this on the default chapter upload page, just to keep bulk uploads as easy and streamlined as they currently are, but adding it to the already more feature-rich chapter edit page for those uploaders that would like to fine-tune how their chapters are presented.

Edit: actually, now that I think about things, this might not fix things for the beginning of a volume, where the blank inside cover is skipped over. If we could have the ability to set any uploaded page to be shown as "solo" or "double", that would work, though.

 

[Teasday]

I myself read mainly in double page mode and yeah, this solution did occur to me while I was making the reader, of course. There are a lot of potential problems with it though, including (as you mentioned) skipped pages (intentional, unintentional and source material errors), inserted art pages, wide credits pages and god know what other inconsistencies. Even if the page setting was just for deciding whether the first page should start on the left or the right, it would heavily rely on the uploader giving a damn. To make this system actually work reliably the uploader would need to mark every single page as left/right/double/other(?) correctly, which is just too much to ask. The next-best option would be to crowdsource the system and rely on Contributors to set the pages, but that just opens a whole new can of worms. Oh, and then we have the problem of people potentially reading right-to-left series with the left-to-right direction for whatever reason.

In short, as annoying as it is, shift+arrow is just so much easier.

 

[vigorousjammer]

Well, that's why I think "solo" or "not solo" is a better option than marking each page as "left", "right", "double", etc, it simplifies things and avoids the problem of left-right reading vs right-left reading.

Currently, any double page is automatically displayed "solo" (or, one file by itself), because the image has landscape dimensions (width greater than height).
So, if you just give uploaders the option of manually marking other pages to be displayed "solo", then pages with portrait-size dimensions (height greater than width) can be marked to be displayed on their own. This is much simpler than having to mark every page, and I think it would easily solve the problem.

Of course, I don't think we should get rid of shift + arrow keys, as that option would still work perfect for when an uploader hasn't properly marked solo pages, but for an uploader like me who would want to adjust how the pages are displayed by default, why not just give them that option?

The only possible drawback I could see would be uploaders abusing the system and marking every page as "solo" because they hate the two-page layout for some reason and would want to disable it for every user or something? However, I think that kind of thing probably wouldn't happen very often and it can be reported when and if it does.