What is frank_scanlation?

FRANK Scanlation is a desktop app for reading manga from ad-hoc scanlation websites, which are fan translated manga sites that tend to be cluttered with ads and laid out as one long scrolling page. Instead of building a curated catalog, you paste in a site's URL and the app extracts the title, cover art, and chapter list automatically, then keeps track of your reading progress. It works on Linux, macOS, and Windows and is the third app in a small family the same developer built. An earlier browser extension overlays a cleaner, dark, page fitted reader on top of scanlation sites, and a separate app does the same for the official MANGA Plus service. This app combines those ideas into one desktop program built with Tauri: it opens a scanlation site inside its own window and injects that same dark reader overlay directly into the page. The main library screen shows a grid of manga you have added, each with cover art pulled from the site itself, your reading status, and a badge when new unread chapters are found. A Continue button opens the chapter right after the last one you read, refetching the site's current chapter list first. Because the app has no special access to these sites, it tracks your progress simply by watching the chapter numbers that show up in the page's URL as you read, using the same detection logic across both the JavaScript reader overlay and the Rust backend. It checks for new chapters shortly after launch and every six hours, sending a desktop notification when something new appears. While reading, the app blocks the window from navigating away to a different domain, which stops ad redirects and popup windows, and hides full screen overlay ads that get injected onto the page, though it does not otherwise modify the site itself. MangaDex is treated as a special case since it is a modern app-like site with its own data API, so titles, covers, and chapters for MangaDex links are fetched through that API instead of guesswork. Data is stored locally in a SQLite database plus a folder of downloaded cover images. The project is open source under the MIT license, and its README states plainly that it does not host or proxy any manga content itself, only loads the sites you point it at.