AnonBlack's Typesetting Guide - Ch. 2 - Typesetting 102: More Skills

[MangaDex]

 

[knecht]

almost every typesetter makes the words too small. even the goldilocks example is pretty bad. a small border is usually enough and is what western comics use.

 

[MarvN]

I disagree. A small border similar to that of western comics is kind of used, but only along the horizontal axis, due to the nature of manga bubbles being tall and skinny. Too many make it oversized and cramped. Though to be fair, that's not to say there aren't some who make it way too small to read.

And yea, ngl the examples aren't the best.

 

[htt]

A loose rule of thumb I follow is to size it comparably to how much space the original text takes up, with a swapped bias towards vertical empty space vs horizontal (to account for jp being vertical and en being horizontal).

(what's the deal with that 'illicit drug' example's positioning tho, so droop)

 

[ryouhira]

yeah... someday i can typeset some manga to my native league

 

[Pallington]

i think a good rule of thumb for non-exclamation spacing is:
super tall box (over 3:1): do what you can to make it look ok, very likely won't be much space.
tall but not super tall (2:1 to 3:1): 1 character between text and edge, roughly
roundish (1:2 to 2:1): 1.5 characters
flat but not super flat(1:2 to 1:3): 2-3 characters
super flat: do your best

also, to the panel edge should be 0.5 less, the above is for bubble edge, up to a point (probably .5 or .4 char)

The goldilocks feels a bit off because the "correct" example is sitting at a solid 2 characters when you could deffo scale it up to 1.5 or towards 1.2. the "incorrect" example is beyond a doubt incorrect tho lol.