[personal profile] snarp
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.

Date: 2011-11-17 10:54 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Have you tried InDesign? It's adobe creative suite's publishing app, so it is all about page layout and mentions in the features on the website a feature called 'text linking' that "Link identical text blocks within a layout so that changes to the parent block are automatically made in all the others." I can't tell if they literally have to have the same content or not, though, which wouldn't help you.

I will say though that I owned a copy about five years ago that was less than intuitive, so it may have a bit of a learning curve.

Date: 2011-11-17 03:54 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] royalarchivist
Seconding InDesign. It's a great program but it does have a bit of a learning curve. If you're already pretty skilled in Photoshop then you have an understanding of Adobe's general menu/tool layout, which will help you a bit.

Another program that came to mind reading this is Manga Studio. I don't have any actual experience with it, though, so I don't know all its capabilities.

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