How to Typeset Manga and Webtoons: A Practical Guide

Typesetting is placing the translated text onto the cleaned pages so it reads as if the comic had been lettered in your language. Good typesetting is mostly invisible: the reader never stops to think about a bubble. You get there with a small set of decisions made once per series, then applied the same way on every page.

This guide assumes you already have cleaned pages and a finished script. Tool names follow Photoshop, but the ideas apply in GIMP, Krita, Clip Studio Paint and Photopea.

Step 1: Decide your font roles before chapter one

A series needs a fixed set of fonts, each with one job. Pick them once, write them down, and do not change them mid-series without a reason.

Role	What it should look like	Notes
Dialogue	Clean comic-style face, very legible at small sizes	The font you will use 80% of the time. Needs regular, bold and italic.
Shouting	Heavier, rougher or more condensed face	Often the dialogue font in bold plus a larger size works fine.
Thoughts / inner monologue	Softer or italic variant	Must be clearly different from spoken dialogue.
Narration / captions	Often a more neutral or serif face	Sits in boxes, not bubbles.
Whispers	Dialogue font, smaller, sometimes lighter	Keep it readable; tiny is not the same as quiet.
Signs, screens, notes	Whatever matches the object	Phone screens want a UI-like sans; handwritten notes want a hand font.
SFX	Display fonts with energy	You will need several. More on this below.

Two rules keep this manageable. First, fewer is better: three or four faces for text plus a handful for SFX is plenty. Second, every typesetter on the series uses the same files, stored somewhere shared, not "whatever is installed on my laptop".

Step 2: Check the fonts support your language

Many comic fonts were made for English only. If your translation needs accented letters, a font can look perfect in the preview and then fail on the first ñ, ç, ş or ư. Depending on your software, the missing letter shows as an empty box, disappears, or is silently drawn in a different font, which you may not notice until QC.

Before a font becomes part of your set, test it with every special character your language uses, in upper and lower case. The free font character checker does this in the browser: load the font, pick your language, and see which letters are missing. The full reasoning, and what to do when a favourite font fails, is in choosing a manga font with full character support.

Also check the licence on the font's own page before your group adopts it. Licences differ, and "free" on a download page does not always mean free for every use.

Step 3: Fit the text to the bubble

Shape the text like the bubble

Most bubbles are ovals or rounded shapes. Text set as a rectangular block leaves empty corners and touches the edges in the middle. Instead, break lines so the text forms a diamond or oval: a short first line, longer lines in the middle, a short last line.

      I told you
   not to come back
 here without telling
     me first.

That is the target shape. Tall narrow bubbles get more, shorter lines; wide bubbles get fewer, longer ones.

Line-break rules that keep it readable

1. Break at natural phrase boundaries. "not to come back / here" reads better than "not to come / back here" when the phrase belongs together.
2. Avoid a single short word on the last line. It looks like an accident.
3. Avoid hyphenation. Re-break the line or adjust the size first. If a long word truly does not fit, hyphenate at a syllable boundary, never in a way that creates a misleading fragment.
4. Do not end a line on "a", "the", "I" or similar small words if you can help it. They want to sit with the word they introduce.

Alignment

Centre-align text in bubbles. Left alignment belongs in narration boxes, letters, screens and long captions, if your series style says so.

Margins

Leave breathing room. A reliable minimum: the space between the text and the bubble border should be at least the width of one letter. If you cannot reach that, the size is too large or the line breaks are wrong. Text that touches the border is the most common sign of rushed typesetting.

When it really does not fit

Translations are often longer than the original. In order of preference:

1. Re-break the lines.
2. Reduce the size slightly, staying within your series range.
3. Reduce leading or tracking slightly, never so far that lines collide.
4. Ask the translator or proofreader for a shorter line. Shortening the translation yourself is an editing decision; send it back rather than silently changing meaning.
5. As a last resort, and only with the cleaner's agreement, extend the bubble.

Step 4: Keep sizes consistent across the chapter

Readers notice when the same character's normal speech changes size from page to page. Set a base size for dialogue and keep everything relative to it:

• Normal dialogue: base size.
• Whisper: one or two steps smaller.
• Shouting: larger, plus a heavier face or bold.
• Narration: often slightly smaller than dialogue.

Use character and paragraph styles (or presets) so the base size is one setting, not a number you retype on every layer. Exact point sizes depend on the page resolution, so write the numbers into your series notes instead of copying them from another group's guide.

Small bubbles tempt you to shrink the text. Shrink a little, then re-break instead.

Step 5: Strokes, weight and emphasis

Strokes

A stroke (an outline around letters) is for text over artwork, not text in clean white bubbles. Inside a bubble it adds noise and makes letters look heavier.

When you do use a stroke:

• Use white or the background colour, outside position, and a consistent width for the series.
• Keep it just wide enough to separate the text from busy art.
• Check the corners: thick strokes on sharp letters can create blobs. Rounded joins help.

Real weights, not fake ones

Use the font's actual bold and italic styles. Faux bold and faux italic buttons distort the letters and look different from one program to another.

Emphasis

Use bold or bold italic for stressed words, consistently across the series. Do not underline, and do not mix two emphasis styles in the same bubble.

Step 6: All caps or sentence case?

Traditional English comic lettering is all caps, and many comic fonts are designed for it: the capitals are drawn to be read in a mass, and some fonts include a special "I" with crossbars for the pronoun and a plain one elsewhere. Webtoons and many newer releases use sentence case, which can read more easily on a phone.

Either is fine. What matters:

• Choose one per series and write it down.
• If you go all caps, use a font made for it, not a sentence-case font with the All Caps button.
• Check how your software's All Caps option handles your language. Some special case mappings (Turkish i to İ, for example) can come out wrong; if they do, type the capitals yourself.
• In all caps, accented capitals sit higher. With tight leading, the accent of one line can collide with the letters above. Test with your language's accented capitals.

Step 7: Sound effects

SFX are where typesetting turns into lettering. Agree on a policy per series with your cleaner:

• Replace: the original SFX is cleaned out and redrawn underneath, and you set a translated SFX in its place.
• Translate beside: the original stays, and a small translation sits next to it.
• Leave: for background noises that do not matter to the story.

When you replace an SFX, imitate the original's energy: size, angle, weight and placement. Rotate and skew text to follow the motion. Use warp or free-transform sparingly, and keep the text editable as long as possible. Give SFX their own layer group so QC can toggle them.

Step 8: Webtoon long strips vs page manga

	Page manga	Webtoon / long strip
Reading direction	Usually right to left in the original; bubble order follows panels	Top to bottom; bubble order follows the scroll
Viewing size	Full page on a screen or tablet	Phone width, zoomed in
Text size	Can be smaller, readers see the page whole	Must be legible at phone width without zooming
Case	All caps is common	Sentence case is common
Files	One page per file	Long slices; bubbles may cross slice edges

For webtoons, test by viewing an exported slice at the width a phone will show it. Text that looks fine in a zoomed-out editor can be too small on a phone. If a bubble crosses a slice boundary, typeset on a stitched piece and split afterwards. The webtoon stitching and splitting guide and the free webtoon stitcher cover this.

Step 9: Use a text-placement helper

Copying each line from the script, clicking a bubble, pasting and applying a style gets slow over a 60-bubble chapter. Helpers such as TypeR (a Photoshop panel) and the older TyperTools load the script and let you place one line after another, with a style preset applied, so you spend your time on line breaks and placement rather than copy-paste.

How to get the most out of any helper:

1. Ask your translator for a script with one bubble per line, in reading order, with page markers.
2. Set up your styles (dialogue, thought, shout) first so the helper applies them.
3. Place everything in one pass, then do a second pass for line breaks, sizing and SFX.

The helper places text. It does not make typesetting decisions for you.

Step 10: Hand off to QC

Before you send the chapter on:

• Keep text layers editable in the working file. QC will find typos, and fixing a rasterised layer means redoing it.
• Name layer groups by page area or bubble order if your group asks for it.
• Export at the release format your group uses.
• List anything uncertain: a line you shortened, a bubble you could not fit, an SFX you left untranslated.

Quality check catches what you could not see after staring at the same page for an hour. Make their job easy.

Common mistakes

• Text touching the bubble border. Re-break or reduce the size.
• Rectangular text blocks in oval bubbles. Shape the lines.
• Font drift. Different typesetters, different fonts for the same character. Fix with a shared font set.
• Inconsistent sizes. Use styles, not retyped numbers.
• Strokes on everything. Only where text sits on art.
• Faux bold and italic. Use real weights.
• Missing accented letters caught only at QC. Test fonts first.
• Editing the translation silently. Send it back to the proofreader.
• Forgetting small text: signs, phone screens, notes, credits page.

Typesetting checklist

• Series font set fixed and shared; licences checked
• Every font tested for your language's characters
• Text shaped to the bubble, centre-aligned
• At least one letter's width of margin inside each bubble
• Sizes consistent, using styles
• Strokes only on text over art
• SFX handled according to the series policy
• Webtoon slices checked at phone width
• Text layers editable; uncertain spots listed for QC

Where this fits

Typesetting is the merge point of the workflow: it waits for both cleaning and proofreading. FansubPanel keeps a shared font library per series and shows the typesetter when both inputs are done, which removes most of the "which font did we use?" and "is it ready yet?" questions. The scanlation workflow, explained shows how the steps connect.