Craft
The technical work behind each release
The people who clean scans, typeset dialogue, and quality-check finished chapters rarely write publicly about what that work actually involves. This section is an attempt to document it — not as a tutorial, but as a description of craft.
01
Typesetting: what it is and what it changes
Font selection, line breaking, balloon composition. The typesetter makes several hundred micro-decisions per chapter that the reader never consciously notices. Until they're wrong.
02
Cleaning: the step before everything else
Before a translator touches a raw, a cleaner has to erase the original text and restore the panel art underneath. This involves reconstruction — filling in background detail that was obscured by the original printing. The tools and techniques for this are not widely documented.
03
Quality checking: the last person in the chain
QC is the final review before a chapter releases. A good QC process catches translation errors, typesetting mistakes, cleaning artifacts, and continuity problems that earlier stages missed. It's unglamorous and essential.
04
The pipeline: how a release actually gets made
Raw acquisition, cleaning, translation, editing, typesetting, QC, release. Each step depends on the one before it. When a pipeline works well it's invisible. When it doesn't, the problems compound.
05
Tools of the typesetter
Photoshop is the historical default. Some groups use Clip Studio. The choice of software affects workflow more than most people expect, and the font library a typesetter builds over time is genuinely important to the quality of their work.
06
Redrawing: when the art is part of the text
Some manga have text integrated directly into the art — signs, background dialogue, labels. Translating these requires redrawing the underlying illustration. This is the most visually demanding skill in scanlation and the hardest to learn.