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Feature 08of 11 · Focus areas

A wide panel on a narrow screen

Focus areas: wide panels, big on a phone

A wide panorama on a phone held upright becomes a thin strip: everything is there, and nothing is readable. In PanelWave you mark the part of a panel that matters — the faces, the hand on the door. On a phone, the player lets the rest go: it enlarges the panel until the focus area fills the screen and centres the crop on it. Tablets, desktops and print still show the whole drawing.

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Pencil sketch of a wide panorama panel with a red-pencil rectangle around two characters; below it, a phone held upright shows only that part, large.
Fig. 8How it works
Fig. 8 — Focus areasMark the part of a panel that matters. On a phone the panel is enlarged until that part fills the screen; bigger screens still show all of it.
focus area per format
1
only phones crop
< 768 px
of the art on bigger screens
100%
Parts listFocus areas

In detail

What you get

01

Mark what matters

Set the focus area per format in the panel's properties. The editor dims everything outside it, so you see what a phone reader will get.
02

Bigger, not smaller

On a phone, the panel is enlarged until the focus area fills the screen — instead of shrinking the whole panorama into a strip.
03

Centred on the story

Without a focus area, a panel that doesn't fit is cropped around its middle. With one, the crop follows what you marked, even at the far edge of the panel.
04

All the art on bigger screens

Tablets, desktops, big screens and print show the whole panel. The focus area only steps in on phone-sized screens.
05

Crops in page view, too

Drag a panel's edge in page view to set its visible area for one format. Phones show that crop where the page's panels run edge to edge; larger screens keep the whole artwork.
06

Balloons travel along

Balloons and hotspots sit on the artwork, so they grow and move with the enlarged panel.
On a phone, only the right part of the panorama has to stay visible (panelwave.json)
"formatViews": {
  "mobile-portrait": {
    "minimalFocusRect": { "x": 0.6, "y": 0.1, "w": 0.36, "h": 0.85 }
  }
}
Who gainsCreators · publishers · readers

What it means for you

For creators

Draw wide when the scene wants it — phone readers still get the faces, not a postage stamp.

Apply as a Founding Creator

For publishers

Landscape pages from your backlist that read well on a phone, without re-cropping every panel for a mobile edition.

Request a publisher pilot

For readers

Wide scenes you can actually see on your phone — no pinch-and-zoom.

See an example
NotesQuestions & documentation

Questions

Read the docs

Further readingFrom the blog

One comic panel at the centre with four copies of it: high-contrast, read aloud as sound waves, with a keyboard focus outline, and blurred behind a content warning.

Technical

Accessibility by Default: What It Means for PanelWave

A comic page whose panels lift off the paper and rearrange into a branching map; one panel, a rainy night street, plays on a phone in a reader's hand.

Behind the Scenes

Why PanelWave Exists

Pencil sketch of a few finished panel drawings being laid onto an empty two-page layout, with a small branch arrow.

Tutorials

Getting Started with PanelWave CMS

Every great story starts as a sketch.

Open the drawing board and start with your script, the smoothest way in, or with the art you already have: panel images, video clips or pages without lettering. Add balloons, shape the story, and see your first chapter running on a screen.

Apply as a Founding Creator Request a publisher pilot