Manga and comic Fonts

Manga Studio Lettering

Surveys of professionals and experts ususally put the Lettering in Manga Studio as its weakest feature. Probably its worst feature is that it ignores the Kerning information in the font ( Kerning adjusts the spacing of the letters correctly according to which letter is next to it ... fo example bringing an A and a V closer together because their diagonals should slightly overlap. Some would say that the lack of Kerning makes Managa Studio lettering a tool for amatures. I have made two fonts that you can download from this page ( click the download button in the top right to download).... These fonts have been designed to be less affected by the limitations of Manga Studio and to take advantage of some of its good features.

If you examine the text in the picture above you will see some comparative tests with Illustartor and Manage Studio. Illustrator does use the Kerning information ( look at the space between the A and V of "AVATAR" ) In fact most competitor products do use Kerning ( Illustarator, Quark, InDesign, Photoshop and even Painter )..... It really is the first thing that Smith Micro need to fix.

My Fonts 888TOTO is a western/US style comic font and 888_MANGA is a manga style font. The shape of the letters and the space between has been designed to be more tolerant of the lack of Kerning ( although they are Kerned fonts that do work properly in other programs.

In Illustrator you can select Bold or Italic if you have installed a "family" of fonts. Many fonts are standalone and so BOLD and ITALIC or BOLDITALIC are frequently not available.
In Manga Studio the family of fonts is not visible and I thought that MS was ignoring them.... but I was wrong... with more investigation I found that if you clicked e.g.BOLD it would use the associated BOLD font but if there was no bold font then it would create a bold version of the font on the fly.... best of both worlds. So my Fonts are single fonts and rely upon Manga studio to provide Bold and Italic. However, you may notice that while the italic is a good italic the automated BOLD in MS is quite a weak Bold. So again these fonts were designed to fix this. The Uppercase latters are bigger and Bolder than the lowecase letters. Designed specifically for those emphasized words within the text balloon. In fact using the Bold function in Manga Studio together with the Lowercase to Uppercase bold in the font gives you 3 increasing levels of boldness to select from..... and all of these 4 boldness levels can also be italisized by MS.

I hope people will find these useful and help allow you to complete the creation workflow entirely in Manga Studio instead of having to switch between programs.... e.g. I still think the Balloon tails in MS are better than anything else available.

e.g. In windows ... download the file and extract the two fonts. then go to Control Panel > Fonts and on the file menu select Install Fonts..... point to the fonts to install them.

I have alo mad some fonts for titles and sound effects with Manga Studio use in mind [link]

You may also want to check out the other Manga Studio Resources I have made available such as..
Natural Painting Brushes for MS at [link]
New black and white inking brushes at [link]

All free... Hope you enjoy

I would love a link back comment if you post anything which uses these resources

Cheers

Tony