Tips from u/Vhrix

Excerpts of Useful Tips from u/Vhrix

Points of Attention in Proofreading:

1) Typos/grammatical errors. Expect few if any of these.

2) Accidentally deleted/omitted words.

3) Awkward sentence structure. [This is a really big hurdle. A translator's brain has to flip between Japanese and English, with each possessing much different sentence structures in terms of subject/verb/object. Sometimes that brain will be stuck in a Japanese-ified mode and produce suboptimal sentences.]

4) Word repetition. [Three sentences in a row with, "Really?"]

5) General improvements. If you think you can make something stronger, suggest it!

6) Remember to pay attention wherever possible to physical constraints of bubble size and formation. Sometimes all kinds of rules have to be broken to fit a given word or sentence onto the page.


Your (7) might read:  "Diction.  Is this line of dialogue appropriate to this character's background, age, education level, situation?"  And then provide an example.



So what are the goals of Western lettering?  Interestingly, they're the goals of actual Japanese manga typesetting:

- Easy readability.
- Consistency.

Suggestion:  One all-uppercase font for all dialogue, including shouts within bubbles.  Maintain consistent size relative to perspective.



AUTO LEADING:

A much, much bigger problem appears to be your employ of auto leading.  If you check the links above again and look at the leading (space between lines), you'll see that it's tight.  A few pixels at most regardless of the font.  With equal degrees of delta between lines of any font.

Take a look here: http://reader.kireicake.com/read/worlds_end_harem/en/0/2/page/23  There's way more space between lines in the thought box font or the thought bubble font than in the dialogue font.

Here, http://reader.kireicake.com/read/the_sister_of_the_woods_with_a_thousand_young/en/0/2/page/8 there's actually more space between lines in a SMALLER font than there is between lines in larger fonts, which doesn't make sense.  The inconsistency on this page baffles me.

http://reader.kireicake.com/read/masamunekuns_revenge/en/0/31/page/10  Look at the delta between what you have in the boxes versus the dialogue font versus the shout font.  All over the place.

Auto leading will automatically scale increases in leading with the scale of the font.  And you need to increase leading as you scale up.  IF... you're using one and only one Comicraft font... you can kinda get away with this (though you're better off manually updating it).  But the real issue appears when you're using multiple fonts and especially from different font makers.  Some leading tables are broken.  Others are simply larger or smaller.  So while auto leading might work within the context of one particular font, you'll have inconsistency when viewed in the context of other fonts.

Suggestion: Supply your typesetters an explanation of how leading works and how they should modify leading such that the delta == that of the main dialogue font.



3)  In all-uppercase comic fonts, the ONLY times you use I's with crossbars on the tops and bottoms are for the personal pronoun I and its various forms.  All other instances should be straight up and down.  This is an American comic convention, and all of the comic fonts you're likely to use were created with two variations for this reason.  (Both Comicraft and Blambot note this rule in their respective mechanics guides.)



Do you have your cleaners ever wand your work?  Looking at so many of these pages tonight, I noticed "putz" all over the place.  I know you're not using topaz.  Does that mean you're just leveling?

(if you don't know how to wand your work, go to Photoshop, select magic wand, uncheck first two boxes, select "sample all layers," set tolerance to 0, and then click in an area that should be all white or all black.  It will show you all the pixels of variance.)

1)  Try using a two-part curve.  It's not hard.  This video (http://photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/curves/photoshop-curves.htm) is usually all people need.  I just trained up a cleaner from 0 experience to spotless curved cleans in three days.  Not hard.

2)  At the very least, instruct your cleaners to paintbrush clear your margins.  Look at the bottom of http://reader.kireicake.com/read/until_death_do_us_part/en/26/206/page/4.  There's big putz all over the place that could be cleared with a simple 100-pixel womp of a paintbrush.  No time or training necessary for that.

3)  Speaking of http://reader.kireicake.com/read/until_death_do_us_part/en/26/206/page/4, none of the blacks that should be all black are all black.  Click your magic wand on the guy's hair or suit.  It's a mess of dark gray that should be black.  This just wasn't leveled/curved properly.



By the way, CC Astro City is usually the solution here.  Its periods are nice and fat and make for very good whole bubble ellipsis.



RE: Darwin's Game Topaz Usage

I'm familiar with Akita Shoten's low-quality printing.  The series I work on that has the best native art is an Akita Shoten title printed on extremely low quality paper.  That doesn't matter.  You don't need topaz.  You don't need skill.  Pages can still turn out like this with a simple curve.  http://img.bato.to/comics/2016/06/25/k/read576de3f3d0f19/img000034.png  That's Akita Shoten.

The problem with the page I sent can literally be fixed with a paintbrush at the margins in less than one second.  That's a massive QC fail.