InDesign, making s2m grumble since 2011!

[slr2moons]

I finished the first draft of Skip 31 three weeks early. ^^V I can't remember the last time I did that! I wanted to complete it before it was time to letter Natsume 14, which will have to be rushed to make deadline, and the new BL oneshot with Clay Editor 3. Still waiting for script for both

Comments

[glowing_fish]

All this unfun technical stuff that has to be done so that I can read manga! I would prefer to think that manga comes flying out of the fingertips of fairies, personally.

[slr2moons]

It does kind of take the magic away. I think the closest you can get to comics from fairies are certain webcomics. One person, doing it all alone, not asking for money or fame, just wanting to tell a story.

Such is a luxury for the independently wealthy, methinks. Must be nice...*wistful sigh*

[badtzphoto]

awesome user pix :)
it's sad that you had to turn down a new title that you love. I hope the new title will be announced soon. Hopefully, it's not licensed or completed by French already.

[slr2moons]

Glad you like my Ren icon! :3 I'm sure it will be announced in a month or two. IDK if it's been licensed by a French publisher or not. It's ongoing in Japan, so I can definitely say it's not yet completed. ^^

[lyschan]

Do you use the master pages function when laying out pages? I can't remember if I mentioned that before-I create a master with bounding boxes to cover the bleed/whatever, then I can drop the images onto the pages and they go roughly where they need to be. I still usually have to go through and resize (I usually stick with one percentage or (occasionally) height dimension to scale them all to) and center (ctrl-shift-E, I think) (if they're print files, they're usually already consistently sized and centered. if the source images are scanned, this isn't so straightforward... then I try to figure out what art margins are consistent between pages, and put in guide markers on the master page so they show up on every page and I can nudge the artwork to match them). Yen's rule is to match the cropping of the original as well as possible (so there's some flexibility on the sides of pages, but top and bottom are generally set

[slr2moons]

*hug* You always try to help me with InDesign. Thank you so much! C:

Viz has an ID book template, with the master page thing and guides and trim marked and all that jazz. *waves hand vaguely* Viz has the same rule about matching Japanese page trim. My 1st and 2nd ID books, I had to scale every image to make them fit. So far, it's only been 3 or 4 needing it out of the first 75 of this third book. The rest fit nicely at 100%.

It's good to know if I DO screw it up, changing it won't be too bad. :B *sincerely hopes she avoids that situation anyway*

Interestingly, my 2nd ID book was all bleeds. Every page. (It was nice not having to deal with page numbers.) This book, bleeds are rare. Maybe one page in 10 has a bleed, and then it's only one panel. Funny how different mangaka do their thing, huh?

I spent 45 minutes today correcting a mistake. I was placing pages with the original tiffs, rather than copies of same in the destination folder for the cleaned and FX-ed versions I should have been placing. Oops. Fixed now. *face palm*

[lyschan]

I always have to remind myself to add the page numbers! It is interesting that you've had such a difference in page bleed for your books. I think almost all of my projects have had some-to-a-lot (Thermae Romae seemed to experiment a bit, being very much inside the margins for the first couple chapters and then breaking out more later... it was rather curious. And then I've worked on a couple 4-koma titles that are margin-bound for the most part

[slr2moons]

Yep, I did the latter option you mention, to relink to the proper files. I had to rename the future-final-tiffs versions, though. :B So had to go one at a time. It IS convenient that ID remembers the folder you're relinking to.

Thanks again for your help! ^^ My ID knowledge is slowly coming back, I think. :B I just hope VIz hasn't changed anything on me in the year since I last used it to letter! :B I'd better ask my editor if they have. ^^;;

[knastymike]

I am hoping that they keep you in mind and maybe need someone else again soon!

[slr2moons]

Me too! *crosses fingers for good luck and good timing*

[ensuing]

Oh ho ho, so you're the one that got Honey Darling! I was wondering who got it.

Ahhh, curious about which series you had to pass on~! Is it a new license? Is it a continuing Viz series?

InDesign is a pain, but it gets easier the more comfortable you get with it!!! And in the long run, I really do think it saves a lot of time. (Ow, I'm getting mentally beaten up from the me when I first started using InDesign for lettering. I'M SORRY OLD ME, BUT IT SAVES SO MUCH TIME NOW!!!)

[slr2moons]

Honey Darling was adorable. ^^ I like the catboy moments. The mangaka really has the ears down. :3

*laughs at your old self beating you up* Okay, so how does it save you time, now you know what you're doing?

[ensuing]

It makes doing text corrections a breeze for me now. It used to be *open page, make change, wait for page to save layered file, make bitmap, save bitmap*. With a series like Psyren where they pages are weirdly monstrous in size it could take two or three minutes a page. But with InDesign, all the text changes are in the same file that takes seconds to save. And if there is a style change, like an editor thinks the leading should be juuuuuust a bit less, I don't have to change everything, I just have to change the paragraph style and the leading is fixed for the whole file.

[slr2moons]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to change something like the leading for every instance of that font in a book like you describe means that each different SIZE of that font has its own master-key-I forget the ID term-listing, right? So if your main font is Whizbang, you'd have a setting for Whizbang at 9 points/10 leading, Whizbang at 8/9, 15/16, 20/21, 5/6, and all the decimals in between, like 8.5/9.5, and 10.25/11.25. Doesn't that get kind of...extreme? And you can forget the shortcuts for the fonts.

Or am I the odd one out that I DO use fonts in a variety of sizes--whatever looks best and is appropriate for the bubble? Hell, I often tweak a font up or down .25 points if I think it looks better. I can only imagine how huge my font master-key-I forget the ID term-listing would be for all that. In my previous two ID books, I just had one setting for each font, and I tweaked each instance of the font individually for size, as needed. So a massive all-book-change with one click on the master key wouldn't work.

Or am I wrong?