Quality Check (QC) — The Last Step Before Release
What QC means in scanlation, what to look for, who should do it, and what skipping it actually costs. With a practical checklist.
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QC (quality check) is the final read before a chapter goes out. The point is not to produce anything new; it is to confirm that everything produced is consistent together.
What to check
A practical checklist:
- Panel order. Easy to get wrong in right-to-left manga.
- Missing bubbles. Small bubbles and corner notes are the most-skipped.
- Overflow. Text leaving the bubble or touching its edge.
- Typos. The most visible and cheapest defect to fix.
- Term consistency. Does a character's name appear two ways in one chapter?
- Font consistency. Is the same kind of speech set in the same face?
- Cleaning residue. A surviving original glyph or grey smear.
- File order and naming. So the upload does not scramble the page order.
Who should do it?
Someone who did not work on the chapter. A person QCing their own typesetting cannot see their own mistake — their brain reads what it expects. In small groups that is not always possible; there, even waiting a day before reading makes a measurable difference.
What skipping QC costs
QC is the hardest step to stay motivated for: the chapter looks finished, everyone wants to publish. Skip it and the mistake is found by readers instead — and fixing it then is far more expensive: files are re-uploaded, a correction note goes out, trust erodes.
One observable pattern: the average number of QC findings rises temporarily whenever a group works with a new typesetter. That is not failure, it is the learning curve — and it is exactly why QC exists.
Related
QC's counterpart on the text side is proofreading. They are different steps and neither replaces the other.