Devlog 2 - StudyBuddy

HERE IS THE LINK TO TRY IT (https://trystudybuddy.vercel.app/)

• left a pile of worksheets extracting overnight cuz i was sick of testing every fix against the same two papers. woke up to 9 worksheets, 713 questions, 353 pages
• everything below only shipped after i swept it over all of that first. rule i have now, after two earlier “fixes” that read perfectly and were wrong on real data

a question that shipped reading ?rac{44}{11}

• i tell the model to write plain text. it writes LaTeX anyway
• sometimes that fails loudly. \sqrt isnt a valid JSON escape so the response explodes and i lose a page. thats fine?? at least i know
• the other half is the problem. \f is a form feed and \t is a tab, both totally valid, so \frac{44}{11} parses perfectly and quietly becomes a form feed followed by rac{44}{11}
• i had an AMC8 question in my database reading ?rac{44}{11} and nothing anywhere reported a problem
• fix has to run before the first parse, not in the catch block, cuz the version that actually hurts u never throws
• it doubles the backslash on letter runs JSON would misread, but only the six that collide (b f n r t u) and only when the run spells a real command. otherwise a real line break stops being a line break, which is a fun way to make things worse

questions torn in half by the page break

• extraction reads one page at a time and never sees the page before or after. so a question ending at the bottom of page 3 with its answer choices at the top of page 4 is never whole in either request. five of them on the AMC8 paper
• one fix folds the halves back together. the other is for the worse case where the extractor returned nothing at all for the second half, cuz a bare block of answer choices isnt a question so the model just drops it. theyre still sitting in the next pages text layer tho, u just have to go get them
• sorting questions within a page needed its own module cuz the bounding boxes lie. question 4 came back with a top of 1428 and question 5 with 1379, so pure geometry puts them backwards
• AMC8 went from 19 of 25 questions having their answer choices to 24 of 25, zero false positives across 348 SHSAT pages

stuff that broke

• a worksheet told me it had 26 questions when the paper has 25. the extra one was the axis labels off a diagram, and the SHSAT ones had rows that just said CONTINUE TO THE NEXT PAGE. dropped 23 rows, all page furniture
• then immediately shipped a followup bug where the card read “Questions 25” next to “Unchecked 26” cuz i filtered one count and forgot the other one lol
• tried just asking the model to return a carried answer block as half a question. produced zero of them and started relabelling stem-only questions as free response, which hides the damage from every check i have. reverted

the landing page

• every animation was gated behind prefers-reduced-motion, which sounds responsible until u find out some managed windows installs ship with animation effects off by default. so the page whose whole job is showing the product working was showing a static screenshot
• the hero panel gets dealt onto the page like a card now. needs a perspective on the parent or the rotations collapse into a shear and it just looks like a slide
• the forgetting curve draws itself left to right. stroke-dashoffset does not work here, pathLength is silently ignored under vector-effect: non-scaling-stroke so the dash tiles across the path instead of spanning it once. and i need non-scaling-stroke or the line renders 9x too thick. used a page-coloured shutter instead

next things: that one AMC8 question needs reading off the page image since the text layer doesnt have it. and theres a cheaper reduced-motion compromise i wrote down but havent built.