Easy Scanlation Guide

[Onimai]

Hello fellow scanlators and future scanlators, I've made a general and easy guide for people who don't know how to properly and easily do a scanlation.
Of course it's not only a guide for new people but also for people who are already scanlators. They can use this guide and add some parts to their working process or learn a few new things. This is only a general guide and not mandatory! This guide is based for manga! (and mostly for Photoshop)
If you have any ideas that could be added, feel free to let me know. If you find any mistakes, feel free to contact me about it.

>>Click here to get to the guide!<<

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[Fris44]

Please do not recommend Wild Words. It's showing its age and most experienced typesetters I know agree that it's just not good. Just because a lot of people use it doesn't mean it's good.

These websites have nice and free comic fonts:
Sara Linsley
ShyFoundry

If you want a all-round-ish CC font, recommend Victory Speech instead

 

[Onimai]

Please do not recommend Wild Words. It's showing its age and most experienced typesetters I know agree that it's just not good. Just because a lot of people use it doesn't mean it's good.

These websites have nice and free comic fonts:
Sara Linsley
ShyFoundry

If you want a all-round-ish CC font, recommend Victory Speech instead

Yea, I agree. It's just that I'm stuck with this font (because of a certain series I'm working on that has been using Wild Words for a long time) and it was the first font that came to mind.

Besides "Wild Words" I also use "CC Mighty Mouth", some SF fonts and a few others.

 

[alexthetrex]

@Onimai Thank you for sharing your guide!

 

[Bentoki]

It's almost impressive how almost everything you said about typesetting is not only bad advice but in many cases the opposite thing that you should do.

Text boxes are good actually, more efficient, and anything you might want to do with point text can be done with text boxes, but text boxes have the added benefit of being able to reshape them and actually improve shaping within seconds.

Your part about text size shows far too small font size for your "good" example.

The amount of auto justification for leading depends on the font, and some conmpanies even recommend specific leadings for each of their fonts. A blanket "just use auto" is silly. The same issue with kerning. Many fonts are crafted in such a way that metric kerning is the intended use, a blanket "just use optical kerning" is silly.

The rest of it is too reductive to even be useful. Like, the part about hyphenation, it's fine to tell people to use a dictionary to see where to hyphenate, but some people for some reason hyphenate on the next line, or hyphenate in such a way that it kills readability in favour of text shape, there are some horrid examples of this. It's important to stress that you should be hyphenating as little as possible.

Looking at the rest of the sections, they aren't much better. I do not think that you are at a stage where you should be giving advice on any of these kinds of things.

 

[Onimai]

Thanks for your feedback!
I will gladly rethink and change a few things so that it suits you more!

Furthermore, I also said that this guide is addressed more to beginners and tried to leave out complicated things.

If you think that my guide is not good you can create a guide yourself so that we all reach your stage (or not because I don't want to get banned from MD discord like you)

 

[Bentoki]

If it was just a case of it a simple guide for people to get into scanlation without needlessly complex details that one be one thing, but you're actively giving bad advice and putting people on the literal wrong path from the get go. If you want to help newcomers the first thing you should do is throw this guide into a bonfire and revisit it in 10 years and apologise to everyone who had the unfortunate experience of being exposed to it.

 

[Onimai]

I suppose after you got fired as police officer in discord you became police officer in the forum now, right? I guess it's time for you to touch some grass and retire.

 

[DaVince]

Nice work.

Regarding fonts, there's something I haven't really seen anyone argue, but which I personally think it's important: since most speech bubbles are very vertically oriented because of the way the original text is written, I would argue that using thin fonts is a better fit than using fonts with very wide letters. Dunno how others regard this though.

 

[Diawa]

Nice work,
I learn a lot of thing concerning the redraw
thanks

 

[orechan]

very good typesetting tips in here, thanks kindly definitely saving for future reference

 

[ThatSoulsGirl]

The typesetting stuff really helped, thanks!