#Fonts used in manga scans software

This will ensure that, provided the lettering on the page youвЂ™ve scanned is easily legible, yours will be too. You can then place your lettering onto the page on another layer and manually adjust it until it matches the point size and leading of the lettering on your scanned page. It should go up to the edge of the bleed area of your print template, if youвЂ™re using one (and you SHOULD be!) but NOT into the outer trim area. YouвЂ™ll need to manually resize it so that the edges line up with the edges of what will be your final printed page. What you need to do then is drag this scanned page into your graphics app of choice. Just aim to crop to the edges of your scanned page as tightly as possible. YouвЂ™ll have to crop this and tidy it up in Photoshop, but thatвЂ™s nothing to worry about. Simply scan a page of a comic you like the lettering design of into your computer.

If youвЂ™re worried about setting the size of balloon lettering suitably for your own comic project, you could use a trick IвЂ™ve relied on in the past to work it out. Or punch up the point size in another balloon imply to make it fill a large area of dead space in a panel. Every once in a while, IвЂ™ll hear from another letterer that they were asked to reduce the point size of text to make a wordy balloon fit in a panel. However, itвЂ™s important to note that, unless itвЂ™s in the service of creating a specific effect (like whispering, or shouting) the lettering for dialogue balloons should be kept at a consistent size throughout. And likewise, a font shouldnвЂ™t be reduced to too small a size. If the font is too large, then it raises the question of whether balloons are obscuring more artwork than they need to. But some common sense decisions can be made. It should be noted that thereвЂ™s no hard, fast rule about how the size of a font should be set in a comic. So, this means that on each new book, a little bit of timeвЂ™s going to be taken over addressing this issue by necessity. In each example, the point size and leading are set to the same numerical values in Adobe IllustratorвЂ™s type handling window.

#Fonts used in manga scans software

And thatвЂ™s down to a few different factors.Д«asically, what you need to understand is that the settings for point size (which describes how tall letterforms within a font will be) and leading (which describes how much space will appear between stacked lines of text) are set numerically within the type handling window of Adobe Illustrator, or whatever vector drawing software a letterer is using.Д«elow is a graphic which shows how three different, commonly used comic book typefaces look when shown alongside each other. Simply put, thereвЂ™s no such thing as вЂstandard font sizeвЂ™ in comic book lettering. But in reality, itвЂ™s a bit more involved. This is one of those questions that youвЂ™d think would have a simple, straightforward answer. Two or three times a year, and sometimes during the production process on a comic, somebody will ask me вЂњwhatвЂ™s the standard size for comic book lettering?вЂќ Making a break with the previous pattern of blog updates, which generally lead to me showing off sample pages from recent projects, I thought it might be beneficial to put together a shorter entry to answer a question I get asked frequently.