In fact using the Bold function in Manga Studio together with the Lowercase to Uppercase bold in the font gives you 3 increasing levels of boldness to select from. Designed specifically for those emphasized words within the text balloon. The Uppercase latters are bigger and Bolder than the lowecase letters. So again these fonts were designed to fix this. However, you may notice that while the italic is a good italic the automated BOLD in MS is quite a weak Bold. So my Fonts are single fonts and rely upon Manga studio to provide Bold and Italic. with more investigation I found that if you clicked e.g.BOLD it would use the associated BOLD font but if there was no bold font then it would create a bold version of the font on the fly. In Manga Studio the family of fonts is not visible and I thought that MS was ignoring them. Many fonts are standalone and so BOLD and ITALIC or BOLDITALIC are frequently not available.

In Illustrator you can select Bold or Italic if you have installed a 'family' of fonts. The shape of the letters and the space between has been designed to be more tolerant of the lack of Kerning ( although they are Kerned fonts that do work properly in other programs. My Fonts 888TOTO is a western/US style comic font and 888_MANGA is a manga style font. It really is the first thing that Smith Micro need to fix. Illustrator does use the Kerning information ( look at the space between the A and V of 'AVATAR' ) In fact most competitor products do use Kerning ( Illustarator, Quark, InDesign, Photoshop and even Painter ).

If you examine the text in the picture above you will see some comparative tests with Illustartor and Manage Studio.

These fonts have been designed to be less affected by the limitations of Manga Studio and to take advantage of some of its good features. I have made two fonts that you can download from this page ( click the download button in the top right to download). Some would say that the lack of Kerning makes Managa Studio lettering a tool for amatures. fo example bringing an A and a V closer together because their diagonals should slightly overlap. Probably its worst feature is that it ignores the Kerning information in the font ( Kerning adjusts the spacing of the letters correctly according to which letter is next to it. Surveys of professionals and experts ususally put the Lettering in Manga Studio as its weakest feature.

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