2011-11-16

snarp: small cute androgynous android crossing arms and looking very serious (Default)
2011-11-16 07:41 pm

I have no particular reason to ask this.

Is there some piece of software that's particularly well-suited to producing scanlations? Or just comics, I guess? I've used Photoshop in the past, when I've done the actual editing part, but it's kind of cumbersome. I feel like by now someone must have come up with a piece of software, or at least a bunch of Photoshop plugins, that can:

* Keep all the images organized in a sort of project, similar to individual pages in a PDF.

* Auto-level a whole volume worth of scanned grayscale pages so that they look pretty much consistent with one another. (I assume that this is possible without screwing things up too bad?)

* Keep text pretty-much-kinda appropriately centered and sized within balloons. I assume that a computer cannot always tell what looks good, given that we still pay people to do this, but given the dimensions of the bubble, it should be able to make a good guess in most circumstances.

* Bulk-edit all the text (say, to change the font).

* Tag certain balloons as certain types of text, like "omniscient narrator," "singing," or "Shigure Sohma," so that you can bulk-edit just that type. Because Shigure's font needs to be just slightly more unpleasant than everybody else's.

* Do a full-text search-and-replace, in case you need to change the way you transliterate a particular name or something. Or find all the scenes in which a particular character is mentioned so that their gender pronouns can be changed. Not that that has ever been a problem in translating any manga, ever.

* Allow notes-to-self on the balloons, which can say stuff like, "fix this later" or "I can't figure out this word." Preferably it should be possible to view all notes project-wide somewhere.

* Maybe generate a viewable script for the whole project. Though obviously it would often not be perfectly in order as the computer cannot understand visual flow well enough to figure out whether balloon A comes before or after balloon B.
snarp: small cute androgynous android crossing arms and looking very serious (Default)
2011-11-16 08:55 pm

I feel like I should be posting about, like, manga or something.

You know, posts that say things other than "I am displeased with a thing that happened at work; allow me to describe it in a manner wavering uncertainly between the astringent and the fustian." I don't think I can do that anymore.

When I have chosen to dedicate above a certain percentage of my energy - sixty? - to a certain thing, the remainder must disperse itself. I can't have two Projects at once. So I come home from expending the sixty-plus percent at work and scatter my attention around on, like:

* like five different books I'm allegedly writing
* and a World of Warcraft fanfic
* manga translation
* Remembering the Kanji flashcards
* Second Life bot
* Glitch
* read a book or manga (and give up midway through, unless it's short enough that it can be completed in under four hours)
* work self into tizzy about presence of headache
* exercise
* consider problem of graduate school
* research mushroom cultivation

I can't do any of these things exclusively for more than two or three days in a row, which is the minimum necessary threshold for anything useful coming of them. It's like my brain has decided that my Big Project is work, and I cannot have another. Little projects are okay; they can't get too big, is all. No more than two days long.

Why do I care about mushrooms now?