How Yaoi Press Letters Manga

Letterers who work for Yaoi Press get our guidelines document. They don't have to follow it by rote, but we do expect to be able to directly edit their work in Photoshop. I've put up the instructions we give our letterers on Ehow:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4888435_comic-book-manga-adobe-photoshop.html

Some of our letterers don't like using the shape tool to make balloons. They prefer the hand-drawn balloon look that you see in most manga. I come from the comic book lettering side of things where stencils were used to make perfectly round balloons before digital lettering took over. You see a lot of perfectly round balloons and perfect triangle balloon tails in our books. These instructions are where that comes from.

Some letterers want to use other software for lettering besides Photoshop. I wish we could be flexible, but there's a lot of people who get their hands on the lettered work before it goes to press. You have a copy editor who needs to fix typos, an author who may want to edit her digital galleys, and possibly even me doing that last once over. The program we most have in common is Photoshop. If we get files that can't be edited in Photoshop it means a lot more back and forth. All of our production staff work remotely. If we need a letterer to go back and do edits it means waiting for her to see the email, then edit and upload the page. Then the next person on the line could have other edits to the page and we start all over again. By having the page be editable right on the spot it lets us just get on with it.