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Scanlations

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nharding:
I'm writing a replacement CDisplay program (for viewing comics / manga) and I wanted to add support for scanlations. I found a program that makes .ovl files which allows you to draw a replacement balloon and insert the text in the new balloon and then export the image. I was thinking of doing that type of thing but in real time, so you would have the original Japanese image, but the text would be replaced with English (similar to .srt files in videos) which means you could turn it off and see the original text (or edit the English text with a better translation). It will have the option to output the manga as a cbz file for support on non Windows machines.

What software do scanlators currently use, and what would you want in this program. (I don't read Japanese and wanted to contribute something)

Neil Harding

Sosseres:
Don't scanlators use photoshop, gimp or a similar program to do that? There are so many things that has to be fixed on most scans that the typesetting is just a part of it. You also have to clean the scans, often redraw content that gets lost, especially over 2-page images or when the text you want to replace is over art.

What you want to do is basically allow people to typeset over the image file so people download the raw and the "srt"?

nharding:
Yes, I was thinking it would make it easier than editing in photoshop and would preserve the original as well (since editing a jpg reintroduces more errors). It would also allow for partial translations to be released so you could have Look Out <???>, then someone else could edit the text further (since they could look at the underlying image). It would only work with opaque speech balloons, but most balloons are opaque.

Neil Harding

Sosseres:
If you want to put out a result quickly I can certainly see the use of what you are saying. I havn't scanlated a lot and havn't done it for several years at all, so I don't know how things are right now.

One point you aren't considering is that most releases use png for greyscale. It doesn't introduce new errors and is often smaller in size than jpeg for a well cleaned page where white is white. Most manga has huge white areas, if those are dotted with very bright grey dots (as is normal after most scans) it increases the file size a lot.

You really have to consider how you would handle pages such as:

http://www.mangafox.com/manga/peony_pavilion/v01/c001/4.html
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/peony_pavilion/v01/c001/6.html
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/peony_pavilion/v01/c001/8.html

It doesn't have to be a perfect solution such as can be made with some time in PS, since that isn't the goal as I understand it. :)

(All three of those were re-compressed by mangafox, proving that jpegs does make new errors.)

nharding:
1) The contents page would probably use a rectangular section to be blanked out and the text would then be added as sections.
2) The text page would lose the background image (although I might try and add something to remove text only and leave colored regions)
3) The text on the white areas would be treated as unbounded text, and it would PROBABLY lose the cloud behind the 2nd text.

I wanted to make it easier for translator to work with, and someone else can then do the final layout, or if the results are acceptable then it could be used on it's own. I appreciate the hard work doing translations and wanted it to be easier for them. Plus I wanted a new viewer anyway that has some features that CDisplay is missing.

Neil Harding

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