Senbonzakura Kageyoshi

Using a good font is a vital part of typesetting. Who cares what the text says if you can’t read the damn letters?

Blambot offers a lot of good manga fonts for dialogue that are also very legible (like Anime Ace, Crime Fighter, SmackAttack, and Manga Temple). Mouth Breather is good for dramatic text.

The Design and SFX fonts can start hovering near that “hard to read” line, so be careful if you use any of those. Gorilla Milkshake is good, as are Seargant Six Pack and Badaboom.

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If you have a series with lots of side text and comments (a la Skip Beat), then you’ll want some “handwritten” fonts. These can be extremely hard to read, too, especially if the font size is small, so be careful! Augie is probably one of the most commonly used handwritten fonts, though now that I’m looking at the site, Angelina looks like it could be nice, too. I’ve used Andrew Script and Expletives Deleted before…

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To install fonts on a Windows machine, you can just go to the Control Panel and there should be an icon for Fonts. On a Mac, double clicking on the font file should open up Font Book, and you can install from there. If you’re using Linux, I’m sure you’re self sufficient enough to figure font installation out on your own :P  After you’ve installed your new fonts, you’ll have to restart PS before they’re loaded.

If you can find a font manager application, I highly recommend it. Font collecting can become an addiction, and being able to browse them all easily and search for “the perfect” font for your page becomes difficult without a manager. I’m running OSX Leopard, and I use FontDoc. It imports the collections from Font Book, but you can enter custom text and view all the fonts in the collection at once. It’s simple, and it’s free. I’d like to hear what Windows users use (hint hint leave a comment).

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All in all, this is where the creative part of typesetting begins. Try to match the English font to the Japanese font on the raw, but always always always remember to look at the page with fresh eyes to make sure all the text is easy to read.

Whatever you do, don’t use regular fonts like Times New Roman or Arial. Typesetting is part of the whole picture, and regular text fonts just don’t look or feel right. At the very least, download Anime Ace from Blambot and go with that ;)

Now that you have your fonts, check out the Intro to Typesetting!