Typesetting 101

Let's start, shall we? The most common task you, as a member of the Pokemon Special Restoration Project will be performing is typesetting. It's the act of putting the text on the page.

All of the fonts for this project can be downloaded here.

The page I'll be using for this tutorial is page 6 of volume 9:

Chuang Yi's translation:
Let's open the Japanese raw up in Photoshop (CS5 in my case). Your layout may be different; I find this layout to suit me the best, but you can try different ones. Nevertheless, I recommend that you at least have the Layers, Character and Styles tabs.

Start by adding a new layer (second button from the bottom right on the Layers tab). You'll keep the original layer as is, and add white regions over it to cover the Japanese text up. Use the rectangle tool (M) or the lasso tool (L) to select the area, then use the paint bucket tool (G; you'll have to change it to the paint bucket from the gradient tool manually) to make the selected area white:

It should look like this in the end:


Switch over to the text tool (T) and start making text bubbles (well, rectangles). For now, just set the font to good ol' WildWords and the font size to 14px.

Notice how I match up the text to the crosshair at the center of the bubble to center the text. While that does a pretty good estimate, you might have to also move the whole text layer around (V) to make it look correctly aligned. Use your judgment:

Keep on copying over the text. You might have to break the line (i.e. between "you've" and got") to keep the text from going out of bounds:


The final product for now. Note that in the bottom two text bubbles, the tildes (~) look weird. That's because WildWords doesn't support tildes, so Photoshop inserts the tilde with its default font. Therefore, type out the whole text without the tilde ("AAAH!!"), then go back and insert the tilde:

It looks...dead. We'll have to spice the typesetting up. The most common convention is by making the loud or shouting text, usually in spiky text bubbles into Bold Italic:

Hmm, still doesn't cut it. Let's also make the text larger. I changed the font size for the shouting to 24:

The text now clips into the surrounding area, but that's okay. Go to Layer -> Layer Style -> Outer Glow. Set the settings like below. The text will still go out of bounds, but it's legible. Some people don't let the text go out of bounds at all; it's just my opinion that this looks better. However, don't spam this style too much, especially for normal dialogue unless the text bubble is just too small.

It would take too much work to do this for every single time the text clips out, so save the style using the "New Style..." button. It should appear in the Styles tab.

Something is still missing, though. It's not very clear in this page, but the Masked Man's voice uses a different font. Thus, we need to change the font as well. The default font for evil voices is "Manga Temple":


Once you switch the text over to Manga Temple, however, you might notice that the styling is turned back to normal. That's because Manga Temple doesn't have a Bold Italic option by default. However, if you go into the Character tab, you can force the font to be turned into bold and italic with their corresponding buttons:

Now, our page is finished. Well, I inserted the title "Vs. Ariados" afterward, but it's just another text bubble with Outer Glow. The font for that kind of "sign" is Syntax LT.

For this project, don't worry about removing the Japanese text such as titles and sound effects if it's just too embedded into the page. We don't have an army of editors and cleaners to do that. If you really want to do so, you could put the sound effects in the margins.

Now, try it for yourself on page 7, and post your results in the comments: