Why all caps?

[KatoShuu]

Just wondering,
is the standard or norm in the manga/comic industry is using all caps? "LIKE THIS"
They usually make the font bigger or smaller when shouting or whispering, but still all caps "LIKE THIS" and "LIKE THIS"

I know there are some groups who use them normally "Like this"

 

[Robinisback]

That’s pretty much because of the comic industry’s crusty old tradition. Blame the American comics from way back, they did it to make things easier to read with cheap printing and poor resolution. Manga scanlations just inherited the habit because "monkey see, monkey do."

But,yeah, All-caps fonts are easier to read in speech bubbles, especially when printed small or in varying panel sizes.
It also helps maintaining a uniform look across dialogue, even when changing font size for emotion and Since comics often have limited space in speech bubbles and all caps can help maintain a consistent look and feel without having to worry about ascenders and descenders (the parts of letters that go above or below the line, like "g" or "d").

 

[Manko-sensei]

I must add that even readers from here have trouble reading (also) when it's not completely in caps (I don't need to tell you about italics). From a TS perspective, there's a lot of good fonts for caps but when it comes to lowercaps they become trashy many times and if they're not completely absent from the beginning they're only offered as a paid option. There are both pages and Discord groups for finding fonts, I may have downloaded hundreds of them for different scanlating groups and the same font may be perfect for standard text but crappy for balloons or manga in general.

At the end of the day, using other fonts than the most common ones or lowercaps is more a matter of confidence and group personality.​