The Infinite Canvas
Why PanelWave treats the screen as a window instead of a page — the infinite canvas, distance-as-time, and how the story graph becomes the camera's trail.
In print, the page is the mandatory unit of composition: every pacing and layout decision is negotiated against its boundary. On a screen that container is arbitrary. The infinite canvas¹ proposes treating the screen as a window: all panels of a story live on one continuous plane, and the reader's viewport travels across it.
PanelWave implements this idea natively since format 1.4.
Space is time
Comics already equate space with time — on the canvas, the distance between panels becomes an expressive variable. Wide gaps slow the action; tightly packed panels accelerate it. Panel size and shape follow only the story, and the shape of the reading path itself can carry meaning: a long descent for a fall, a sideways drift for a detour, a zoom for a revelation.
The graph is the trail
Historical infinite-canvas experiments mostly failed on navigation — readers got lost on the plane. PanelWave sidesteps this because the story graph already defines what comes next: the canvas only adds where panels sit. The camera follows edges, conditions route it to different regions of the plane, and branching structure becomes physically tangible — parallel timelines run as parallel columns, a secret path sits visibly off the road, and hidden panels stay veiled until visited.
Two subsets of the same model:
| Layout shape | Result |
|---|---|
| One column, guided camera | A webtoon-style vertical strip — the proven mainstream format |
| Free 2D placement + camera trails | The full infinite canvas — a capability unique to graph-based comics |
Where things live
- Format —
Chapter.canvasholds world-space placements, camera policy, and decorations;Edge.cameraMoveholds the travel choreography;FormatPreset.canvasViewgates the mode per output format. Everything is additive: works without a canvas are untouched, and print always uses pages. - Player — canvas view renders the plane with a gliding camera, guided or free-roam input, an overview zoom, and full reduced-motion and screen-reader support.
- CMS — the Canvas Layout Board is the authoring surface: spatial placement, camera-move inspection with path ghosting, gap calipers for pacing, reveal modes, and decorations.
Start with the vertical strip. It ships a familiar, phone-friendly reading experience from the same data model — and you can grow individual chapters into full 2D canvases later without changing anything else about the work.
¹ The term infinite canvas was introduced by comics theorist Scott McCloud, first sketched in a 1995 lecture and formalized in his book Reinventing Comics (2000).