Text removal destroys halftone/screentone backgrounds, forcing hours of manual redraw

Summary

Scanlators and comic localizers report that clearing lettering works fine on flat black or white areas, but collapses completely on halftone and screentone backgrounds — the moment a bubble overlaps a dotted or textured pattern, automated removal smears the dots, leaves ghost artifacts, or wipes the pattern entirely. Users describe 'scratching my head on this panel for over an hour' and reaching the point of wanting to 'drop it all together' rather than finish the page. The only fallback is painstaking manual reconstruction: cloning dots by hand, rebuilding the tone with a custom brush, or sourcing a matching screentone — per bubble, per page, per chapter. This is the single highest-friction step in the comic translation pipeline and it is genuinely unsolved: current OCR/text-removal models are trained to inpaint generic backgrounds and have no understanding of periodic halftone structure, so they fail exactly where manga art is densest. MangaTranslate's own pipeline lists background repair as a core step, which makes halftone-aware inpainting the decisive quality differentiator — a technical gap that, if closed, would convert the most frustrated users into paying customers.