Once you navigated away from a trailer, the only route back to it was the URL.
The page offered a way to start work and no way to return to it, which meant
every finished run was effectively lost the moment you closed the tab.
The list leads with what someone actually wants to know at a glance - is it
finished, did every writer survive, has anything been drawn, what has it cost -
rather than with an id and a timestamp. A run still working shows what it is
doing and keeps polling, so this is also the page you land on to check
progress.
trailer.html gets a link back, so the two pages are a loop rather than a
one-way trip.
Uploading "Memory Road interior 12-28.pdf" produced a book, a run and a
storyboard all headed "Memory Road interior 12-28". The title is derived from
the filename because that is the only thing an upload carries, and publishers
name files after print runs.
Guessing harder is the wrong fix - stripping "interior 12-28" would be a rule
that works on one file. Letting the author type the title takes eight lines and
is right for every file. The author field goes in at the same time; it costs
nothing and a trailer should know whose book it is.
"Drop the manuscript here or click to choose a file" is a drop zone pretending
to be a button - it reads as an instruction rather than a control, and on a
laptop nobody drags a file from anywhere. There is now an actual button. The
zone still accepts a drop, because that costs nothing once the button exists.
The paste box is gone. It was there for a manuscript that would not upload
cleanly, but a book is 100,000 words and nobody pastes that; keeping it meant
offering a route that only works for the case it was not for. Word and PDF
cover it, and a PDF that turns out to be a scan is refused with the reason.
Takes a .docx, a text .pdf or a .txt up to 6MB, or pasted text for anything
that will not upload cleanly. The upload itself only stores the file and writes
a row - extraction runs afterwards on the server, because ptl_api is
synchronous with a five second budget and parsing a novel is not a five second
job. The page polls until the book says ready, or says why it could not be
read.
readFileB64 lives here rather than in app.js: app.js's resizeImage goes through
an <img> and a canvas, which is right for a phone photo and fatal for a .docx,
and this is the only page that uploads a document.
