Doujin Sign

Welcome to another episode of Hal’s Tips! I’ve leave the rest of the post to him now.

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Today, I’m going to cover the Character menu, which is one of your best friends as a manga editor in Photoshop. The menu itself is somewhat hidden, and has a lot of somewhat confusing options, so I’m going to try to explain what everything is to make it more useful to everyone. This menu lets you change almost every property of whatever font you’re using, and in combination with text selection can let you perform all sorts of tricks with whatever text you’re using.

You can see a screenshot of the menu, as well as the submenu, here:

You can bring up this menu at any time by going to Window and selecting Character; you can also dock it to the palette well (as seen on the first option in the submenu), which will keep it among the tabs that come up by default in the upper right hand side of Photoshop – you’ve probably seen things like Brushes and Tool Presets there already. I usually keep it there since it gets frequent use when I’m doing typesetting; it’s easier than bringing up and closing the menu every time I need it.

I’ll cover each item point by point, starting from the top and going left to right on the main window.

The first drop-down is fairly obvious; this is the font name. If you’re using this window, you’ve probably already picked out your font and just need to modify the way it looks. You can change it from here if needed, however.

The second drop-down is the style. If there are multiple styles for a font (such as Italic or Bold) you can change them here.

The first drop-down on the second row is also obvious; this is the font size. Its main use here is as a reference, although you can change it here if necessary. More on this in a minute.

The second drop-down is the first that actually has some use; this is the line spacing value. For many of the values available for change in the Character dialog, a font will have preset values; however, often those preset values aren’t chosen very well. For demonstration’s sake we’ll use the font “Excellentia in excelsis”, which is a very nice-looking font with some utterly terrible preset values. We’ll start with the line width; here’s two examples of Excellentia in excelsis, taken at 24px:

The writing on the left uses the font’s native line spacing; notice how much whitespace there is between the lines. This doesn’t really look good when you’re typesetting speech with it, so on the right I’ve changed the line spacing from the font’s default of Auto (which will always match the font size you’ve selected) down to a 16px spacing, which looks much more appropriate. Depending on other settings you can change for the font your line spacing may get messed up, so you can always correct it here – just remember that the Auto defaults to the font’s current size.

The first box on the third row is kerning; this is one that you’ll pretty much never want to change. Kerning is related to the spacing between characters; it determines how characters can overlap (such as the top of a “V” overlapping with the foot on an “A”). These values are set by the font designer and shouldn’t really be changed, as they can get a bit finicky. There are other tools we can use, though…

Such as row 3, number two – the tracking value. Tracking refers to just the plain spacing between characters, without taking the letters’ shapes into account. Let’s look at the same Excellentia in excelsis again, on one line this time:

As you can see, the first line looks extremely cramped – it’s hard to read due to the characters being so close together; this is the font at its native tracking value of 0 (which is the default value for all fonts). Since this is so cramped, however, I’ve updated the tracking value to 50; this keeps the style of the font fairly consistent, but with the characters further apart it’s a lot easier to read.

The main trick I use with this is in general typesetting. My usual font of choice is Anime Ace 2.0; like most fonts, it’s perfectly legible at a tracking value of 0. However, when I’m writing, I’ll almost always leave the tracking set to 100; this makes things a bit wider than normal, but not outstandingly so. The main advantage for this is that if you run into a word that’s just slightly too wide for the bubble you’re in, you can highlight just that word and decrease the tracking value for that word to make it fit. If your tracking is set to 0 by default, you can’t really do this, as getting into negative tracking values will start making letters overlap for most (although not all) fonts.

The fourth row is fairly obvious; these two values are for the relative height and width of your characters. You may not need to change these, as using the Transform tool on the text layer will let you change the height and width of the entire area at once with better control, but if you need only part of the text to be taller or wider, you can highlight it and change the values here. While the horizontal value will keep your tracking values intact, increasing or decreasing the vertical value won’t take your line spacing into account so you may need to correct it once you’re done setting the value.

Fifth row, column 1 is the baseline value. Generally you won’t ever need this; what it does is move the text up or down from the font’s default baseline by a set amount. I’ve never found a reason to use this, so you can probably safely ignore it. Column 2 is color; you can reset the font color here if necessary.

The sixth row is text effects; these will let you apply formatting effects to fonts that don’t normally have those options available.

- Faux Bold makes the text appear heavier.
- Faux Italics will slant the tops of the characters to the right, as with an italic font.

- All Caps will force anything typed to appear all in the capital letters used by the font.
- Smallcaps will force all lowercase letters in the font to appear as slightly downsized versions of the capital letters in the font.

Smallcaps and All Caps are useful for fonts like Sand that don’t have a lowercase character set.

- Superscript will set the text to approximately half size and half a line above the main line of the text.
- Subscript will set the text to approximately half size and half a line below the main text.

Not terribly useful in manga editing, although if you’re patient you can use sub- and superscripting to create irregular lines of text – can be useful for ragged screams and that sort of thing.

- Underline places a line below the text.
- Strikethrough places a line through the center of the text.

Self-explanatory.

And the final row containts the character set used (normally English: USA, although some fonts like SF Comic Script or Shonen Punk Custom Bold may have multiple character sets available for things such as accented characters and the like) and the anti-aliasing settings; normally since you’re using fairly small font sizes you’ll use Strong, although large, heavy text may warrant a different setting – experiment to get what you like for a given situation, if Strong is too much.

And that brings us to the submenu. You can access the character submenu by hitting the little button with a triangle on it; if you keep the character menu docked to the palette well, it’ll appear as a small triangle to the right of “Character” on the tab in the well, when you select the character menu.

Dock to Palette Well lets you keep the Character menu in the palette well; if you’re going to be editing much, I’d highly recommend this, as this is one of the more useful tools you’ve got in Photoshop.

The next section contains the same text effects that are present in the character dialog itself; there’s no need to cover them again here.

The next two lines, however, are a bit more useful. Change text orientation will shift your text from a horizontal left-to-right orientation to a vertical top-to-bottom orientation, although in most cases the letters themselves will also rotate – you’d turn your head sideways to read the text. If you want to write vertically but with horizontal letters, however, you can select Standard Vertical Roman Alignment from this menu, which will rotate the letters to the normal left-to-right alignment while displaying the text vertically – extremely useful for text that’s in very narrow bubbles and the like.

The remainder of the menu deals with internal options for characters that the font will display; again, there’s very likely no reason you’d ever need to alter these, so feel free to ignore them.