PART TWO: THE NOT VERY IMPORTANT STUFF
(or: The Really Long version)

1. Me jabbering about history


1. Me jabbering about history

HI EVERYONE! ^_^
Oh wait, I already said that, didn't I? Well get used to it. I repeat myself a lot and when I get talking, I keep at it for a while. ^^
I'm going to do this sort of chronologically, otherwise I'll forget where I am and things will get missed.
THE BEGINNING!
EvlNabiki & I started this project, give or take, in February of 1999. Why did we start it? How did we start it? GOOD QUESTIONS!
The how part is pretty easy. Christmas of 1998, both of us acquired scanners, after discovering that they had suddenly become very affordable. In late January, out of curiosity, we did a scouring run around the web looking for translation scripts for the Ranma manga that was ahead of where Viz was. Much to our surprise, there were an incredible number of scripts available online. Out of over 200 chapters Viz had yet to do, we were able to find all but about 30 of them. This was probably THE most essential step, cause we can't read a word of japanese ourselves. With such a good starting point, we then went in search of the import mangas, the third and final component to starting a project of our own.
All the Ranma import manga we bought were purchased in one of two stores. Pandora's Cube, and Creature Zone, both in suburban Maryland outside of Washington DC. The books we found first were at Pandora's. All the books we bought there were actually in Kanji, which is chinese, and not the original Shonen Sunday collection. We discovered much much later, much to our annoyance, that these kanji translations of the original were inferior prints to the original. But by the time we figured this out, it was way too late to do anything about it.
Our plan was to buy all the books from book 16 (which is where Viz was at the time we were buying them), and book 38, the end. But Pandora didn't have all of them in stock. The books they were missing were books 25, 30, 33, 36, and 38. It is those five books we found later at Creature Zone (not only the proper original Shonen Sunday collection, but less expensive than the inferior Kanji books! ARGH!). We had an opportunity to rebuy all the books in Shonen Sunday format then, but since we'd already spent so much money on it, we didn't think it was worth it. Little did we know at the time. Oh well.

Anyway! So we had all three components at last! Scanners, import manga books, and scripts to work from. The scripts had holes, and in many cases were pretty poorly written, but they were close enough for us.
Oh! And before I get too far off track here, I want to mention that our original inspiration for all this was The Ranma Project, the first project that preceeded ours. The original project was basically just one guy, working alone, putting out the occasional chapter of translation. He had an advantage on us that he could apparently read the actual language, and wasn't dependant on scripts. But his scans were very poor quality, being on 2-color scans. And for nearly a year before we picked things up, he had been too busy to do any new chapters. So now that we had all the pieces we needed, and the original guy seemed to have stopped, we began.
But before we could begin, we needed to solve the pesky problem of scanning the damn pages! It's harder than it sounds. Scanning manga pages is a lot harder than scanning color. You get bleed through from backing pages, gray fuzz from the grain of the paper, all kinds of icky garbage.

>>>But I wont get into that now, since I've already written a lot on the subject. For a complete history of the trials and tribulations of our scans, go read Appendix F: which is a quote from an email I wrote on this subject to Bryan Porter, quite possibly our most vocal fan to date. ^_^

Back to us! When all three of these elements were finally in place was in February of this year somewhere. Not even really sure exactly when we started, but I'm sure it was in there somewhere. For the next two months, give or take, we poked around with doing translations entirely on our own. Scanning and translating them ourselves.
A question might occur to some people in here. If we had the import books, AND scripts to the chapters, why the heck did we bother with all this stuff? Why not just use the scripts to read the books and then go on with our little lives? WELL, you ever try to do that? Read a japanese book from a script? IT SUCKS. You have the book in one hand, the script on the page, and you have to glance back and forth, read a line, find where it belongs on the page (remember all japanese books are backwards, they read right to left), then back to the script, do this ten times a page, compensating for some very poorly and unimaginitively written scripts, and it just completely squeezes all the joy out of the experience of reading Ranma. The spontaneity and surprise and most of the humor are just trashed.
Being possibly the most tripped out, freakazoid Ranma fanatics around, trying to do this to our precious Ranma borders on sacrilege. ^_-
So we started scanning and fixing them properly. Just so they'd be more fun to read. And the fact that we started posting them on the newsgroup was mainly to entice people to help us out. Remember we're talking about 4000 pages of translations! Working by ourselves it would have taken years and years to finish. Far longer than we'd ever have the time or stamina to keep at it. So everyone out there getting to share in our work is, basically, just a side effect. A bonus for all of you. The main goal of the project was for EvlNabiki & myself, and later for all the people who actually contibuted to the project, to just have a fun way to read the series.
Are we crazy or what? ^^

So anyway! Between February and April of 1999, EvlNabiki & I managed to put together about 15 chapters of translations. Most of those early efforts were pretty mediocre. No sound effects, pretty uninventive dialogue. They were mainly for our own enjoyment, just something to give us basic comprehension when reading the pages. We weren't really concerned with precision or quality at that point. Just the basics.
Then starting in April we both began to realize what a huge task we'd taken on, and that there was no way for us to do it alone (BTW it was EvlNabiki that suggested we start our translations to begin with, and I who suggested taking it onto usenet and begging for help).
Because I have always been far more a usenet follower and general net fanatic than EvlNabiki is, it logically fell to me to post the chapters online, and solicit and coordinate our helpers.

Our first chapter posting was on April 8th, 1999. We started by posting one chapter (book 17, part 5), and asking if anyone was interested in our work and wanted to see more. The response was unanimously positive, so we started posting our early efforts, one chapter a day. On the second day I wrote in a read me that started our extended plea for helpers. In just three days, on April 11th, we got our first volunteer, Dark Alpha. Dark Alpha had lots to offer, help on translations, help creating a web site (of which neither EvlNabiki & I have any skills in doing), lots of stuff.
He also pointed out that our scans really didn't look as good as they could look. Which sparked much experimentation and a lot of cursing when he realized he was right. After just three days of chapter posting, we had to stop, rescan and refix all fiifteen chapters we'd finished up to that point. >_<

>>>More details on this snafu in the scan history of Appendix F.

At the time, EvlNabiki & my work had just gotten up to book 20, part 2, so we sent Dark Alpha RM20-03 to work on, the very next chapter. Ostensibly this was as a practice chapter, but he did such a good job on it, way better than we had been doing up to that point, that it was posted as the final version, and changed a lot of the ways EvlNabiki & I operated on our own work from then on. It ceased being a personal project aimed at basic comprehension, and went to something where looking good mattered.
About a week after Dark Alpha signed up, our second volunteer, MojoBaka, signed on (don't worry I'm not going to go through everyone one at a time, that would take forever).
When MojoBaka joined us is when I created The Practice Chapter. I decided we should have one chapter ready to go whenever a new person signed on, for them to try out the job and practice their skills on. One that didn't count as a final, just in case someone stinks. ^_-
Half by chance, and half by some simple logical criteria, we settled on book 29, part 8, the Evil Oni storyline, to be that practice chapter. And that survived throughout the whole project. Except for Dark Alpha, who signed on before we started using it, EVERYONE in the project did that storyline as their first effort. I've got like 30 different versions of it now. ^^;

And from there it was pretty straight forward. We had all the books, we just needed to scan them, and hand them off to our assistants. As time went by, more people joined in, and some left. But by and large we just kept getting bigger, adding more people, and dividing up the chapters as needed.
I pulled a nearly complete list of the Ranma manga from the net somewhere, and then filled in the last few books that weren't listed myself, and that became the Ranma Manga.txt file, which I used to keep track of who was working on what, what had been posted, etc. That's the same list that I quoted up in the important stuff section.
But here someone might be asking, just what WAS the process of volunteering for The New Ranma Project? What happened? What did we do?
Glad you asked! Cause I was gonna tell you anyway. :P
As I mentioned before, we had built up a bunch of chapters on our own before we ever started posting them. And we doled them out one chapter at a time. Why? Well part of the reason was to avoid being flamed for flooding. But more importantly it was a blatant ploy to stretch things out and create more opportunities to beg for help. Every day I posted with our chapter a READ ME, which had important information to be sure, listing what we'd posted, our disclaimers and the members of our team. But right at the top of ever read me in big letters was AND REMEMBER WE CAN ALWAYS USE MORE HELP!' ^_^
And help we got. Plenty of it. I had to create a kind of assembly line of information to deal with all the new volunteers we got. For the early volunteers, I had to write out very long and detailed descriptions of what the work we were doing was all about, what would be expected of them, what we'd do for them, etc.
But I soon found that I was repeating myself over and over, saying basically the same information to each new person, and wasting a lot of time writing it all out. So I dug through the emails I'd written before, and cobbled together The Directions. This was just a string of emails I'd written to assorted people who volunteered, explaining what we did and how we did it. The best beginner's guide I could come up with at the time. It was also so long and so detailed that anyone who actually read all of it had to be pretty serious about helping us out. ^_-

>>>The Directions file is pasted in here as Appendix A. You can read the entire thing below. The file you see is the final version of The Directions. Over the course of The Project it was amended to and expanded many times, adding things in as I discovered myself telling people the same things over and over.

Well then! Got that all read? Really? You're more intrepid than I thought. That file killed more than one person. :P
If a new volunteer survived reading me blabber on through The Directions, they were ready for The Translators Starter Kit. If someone is going to help, it's only fair that I give them the tools to do it, yes? This one is blissfully short, just containing a description of the pack of programs and related material I sent them to start them on their way. The basic starter kit intro was the paint program, i_view my favorite viewing program, the zip full of translation scripts, and the practice chapter. Much later on we added in our special gif converter program, and right at the end I dropped that off in favor of using the latest version of i_view to accomplish the same effect.

>>>The Translators Starter Kit introduction and instruction file is Appendix B.

As I mentioned in the scan history, for the first 1/3 of the project or so, all our work was done in the jpg format. Which made things twice the size they should have been as properly condensed gifs. When we finally discovered the error of our ways, we had to do a massive conversion, and tell everyone on the team about our new way of doing things. I posted an altered version of this email to inform all our fans about our big conversion, but I also wrote an original version that was only sent to team members.

>>>The team members only conversion email is Appendix C.

MUCH later on, as our project was entering the final third of our work, we discovered that the most recent versions of the i_view program could accomplish the same result as the converter we had been using up to that point. But since the converter we used was still functional, we didn't bother making a big deal of it and telling everyone to switch to the new method. But anyone trying to duplicate our work for any other import manga would want to use the refined method with i_view.

>>>The refined i_view directions is Appendix D. These directions are only valid for i_view version 3.0 or above (they are currently up to version 3.5 I believe). You can find the web address for downloading the i_view program free in the scan history of Appendix F.

As time went on, more and more people joined our project. As each person joined, they were put through the initiation process that everyone got. First I sent them The Directions. And if they suffered through that huge thing and still wanted to go at it, I sent them the starter kit and intro for it.
It was at this point that we lost most people. For every THREE volunteers we got to our project, full of fire and vim and vigar, only one person stuck with it through even the practice chapter. Most people vanished right there. And few of those that dropped out had the decency to email me to say they didn't want to join us after all. They just stopped returning my emails and ignored me. :(
I don't know if they were just too ashamed that they weren't any good at it to admit it to me or what, but I sure wish everyone had been more direct and honest with me. I'd much have preferred being told that someone wasn't interested after all than writing them 5 emails asking for updates or some clue as to their progress, and receive only silence in return. That happened also with several translators who actually stuck through it and did a chapter or two, and only THEN did they vanish and never return my emails. Those were even more frustrating cause then I needed to just write them off and give the chapter to someone else with no information except silence to base it on.
Anyone thinking of trying out a project similar to ours on another manga series better be prepared for a lot of frustration. But those few gems you find, dedicated, passionate, hard-working, talented, the people that really made this project fly, make it all totally worth it. I've met some truly wonderful people working on this project. People I'll never forget. :D

Oops, I'm getting all sappy again. Where the hell was I?

Ah yes! New Translators. As new translators came in, I put them through the whole new person process, weeding out a lot of people who weren't serious about our work, and finding those few gems that were really into this and would see it through.
So throughout the entire summer and into the fall, this process continued itself. New people would come in, most would go no where, but a few would join the ranks of the real team players and pitch in their piece. During this whole time EvlNabiki & I spent all our time writing around to everyone, keeping people in touch, inducting new people, posting finished chapters, and above all frantically scanning and scanning and scanning. Months of it. Usually we'd get an email in with someone's finished chapter, and they didn't have the next one to work on yet. We'd drop everything we were doing, skip to that next chapter, do it up right on the spot and send it off. Although when possible we tried to keep people supplied with at least one chapter ahead, so we wouldn't have that panicked rush and the translator wouldn't have any downtime when they felt like working on it, but didn't have the pages to work on yet. Sometimes it worked that way, sometimes not. ^^;

WARNING! INCOMING BLATANT TOPIC CHANGE!

Web hosting! Well heck, we've got all these chapters, posting them to the newsgroup is nice for a start, but we've got to keep them up somewhere, don't we? Otherwise I would have been swamped by repost and email requests till doomsday. And we couldn't possibly answer them all. Posting for us is very time consuming. We write up every post, one at a time. We don't use autoposter or any of those things. And we're doing all this stuff over dialup modems. We don't have some kind of super cable T1 isdn dsl supermonster kind of thing. Everything we do takes a LOOOOONG time. Uploading chapters to translators, downloading finished ones, posting, we'd often be at it for much of the day sometimes.
In the beginning of The Project, when the total size of our work was relatively small, it was a bit easier. At the start, a helpful guy named Jason McNew, who I haven't really mentioned up to this point, completely of his own initiative, started putting all our chapters up on his school-hosted website. He was invaluable help in the early stages of our work. But soon the size of our work outstripped his capabilities to hold them all, and then summer arrived, school shut down, and his website went with it. Sadly he wasn't able to help us anymore after that, but I wanted to make a point of thanking him in here for his early help. Everyone who contributed all along the line was much appreciated. ^^
After that we had the original web help offered by Dark Alpha. But Dark Alpha didn't have enough space or bandwidth limit either. Also, burdened with doing translations of his own, schoolwork, and other responsibilities, he couldn't really update his site with the regularity we needed, and his newsfeed was unreliable so it added a burden on me that not only did I need to post all the chapters, but I needed to send him a copy as well. Obviously a temporary solution at best.
But, finally, via a note sent in to Dark Alpha, we got The Big Hero Of Web Hosting! Our pal, Wei Jing Guo! You guys all have to really appreciate just what Wei Jing offers all of you. Since he joined in June, Wei has hosted ALL the pictures, every damn one, and the final size of our project is over 400 megs. His server, which is a box of his own feeding through his cable modem line, feeds up TWO GIGS of traffic every day! If you do the math on that, at an average of two megs per chapter, he's feeding out 1000 chapters of Ranma per day. Enough to download our entire project four times over. EVERY DAY.
And all this for FREE! If we had to pay for a web service like that on a commercial basis, it would cost us hundreds of dollars EVERY SINGLE MONTH. And you can bet what the chances of us doing THAT are. Zilch.
Late in the project we've acquired a couple of mirror sites to share the load, but for the entire heart of the project, the packmule of web hosting has been Wei Jing. And he updates practically every day. I can't even begin to estimate the nightmare of reposting and requests he saved me from. Absolutely invaluable. :)

WARNING! YET ANOTHER BLATANT TOPIC CHANGE INCOMING!

Translation scripts! You'll remember that I said that we found MOST of them online, but we were still missing about 29 of them. And 23 of those missing scripts were in books that we only had in Kanji. I know several people who study Japanese, but I didn't know ANYONE who can read Kanji.
In many respects, our project was started on faith when we didn't have all the necessary tools to finish the job. I fully expected us to have to close down the project and declare it finished without all chapters being done cause we couldn't fill in the scripts we were missing.
But out of the blue, one of our new volunteers, Shih-Schon Lin, made a fateful offhand comment. You see, Shih-Schon volunteered with intention of becoming a graphics translator just like everyone else. But an offhand comment he made in his volunteer letter made a world of difference. He mentioned that he noticed our posts thus far had actually been from Kanji books, and that I could skip sending him the translation scripts, because he could read the Kanji himself.
WOO! You gotta know I was dancing in the streets when he told me that. I wrote back that if he REALLY want to render a critical service to our project, he would be MUCH more valuable doing scripts for the chapters we were missing. Full credit given to all our translators, they worked their asses off, but none of them could have done what Shih-schon did. He's the ONLY volunteer we ever got that could read chinese. And to our delight over the course of the summer and fall months, he filled in ALL the kanji chapters we were missing.
The rest of the missing chapters were the last 2/3rds of book 38, and those were filled in completely unbidden by us by the guy who runs The Ranma 1/2 FAQ, that I mentioned way up in the important stuff section. Special thanks to him and all the other script writers who we shamelessly mooched off of to get our scripts. ^_^

OK! YOU CAN STOP DUCKING NOW! GETTING BACK ON TOPIC!

Um...what the hell was I talking about again? ^_-
Not much left to say actually. I'm not going to give a book by book, translator by translator history of The Project in the FAQ here, cause I already did that in the index pages of each book. I have a habit of repeating myself, but at least I won't do it on purpose. ^^;
What else can I tell you about our work?
Well, as the summer and fall wore on, the parade of chapters and translators coming and going and emails going to and fro dashed about, setting up a nice self-feeding loop that tore through the series at an amazing rate.
Sometimes certain translators wanted to go above and beyond what I had original asked of them, and do a really thorough, complete translation of a chapter. Including all or nearly all of the sound effects for the chapter. Gary Kleppe was the first to do this on a regular basis, and many others joined in as their skills improved to the point that they could pull it off.
But as others were trying to learn how to do a complete translation, they had a LOT of questions on how to do it. And when anyone on the team has questions about anything, who do they ask? ME! That's who. :P
So after I repeated myself enough times, as per usual, I got tired of saying the same thing over and over, and I wrote up one HUGE definitive email on the subject of editing manga pages, and sent it out to everyone.

>>>Ranma manga editing tips email is Appendix E.

Finally, my own feelings on the Project. It's been quite a rollercoaster ride, and an interesting challenge for me personally. I've never considered myself The Boss Type', but I found myself volunteered for the role. Doing the project was an interesting blend of thanking people for all their wonderful help, and gently nudging people to pick up the pace when they were going really slow, yet without offending them cause after all they ARE doing all this for free. It was a delicate and fascinating balancing act that I think I accomplished fairly well.
But ultimately EvlNabiki & I were just a catalyst. An important lynchpin in the project to be sure, but it was all the wonderful people who volunteered to help us out and put in unbelievable amounts of work that finally made our project fly unlike anything we could have imagined back in February.
I am both sad and relieved that we are now finished. After working so hard, it's difficult to believe that we're actually finished. It seems in one way I'm saying goodbye to old friends. Their story complete, it is time to close the book, sigh happily, knowing that the time was well spent, and move on. But I've made many wonderful new friends in the last year, and I hope to remain friends with many of them long after the project is closed.

I hope you've all enjoyed sharing in our friendship too. :)
Appendices to follow.

Thanks for sticking with us.
Goodbye. ^_^

SHADE :)
:::::

Appendix A: The Directions File
APPENDIX A: The Directions. Whenever a new volunteer would email me, this is the first thing they'd see back from me:

Alrighty! What I usually do for new recruits is paste in The Directions. Which is a bunch of emails I wrote to people early in the project, and I just stitched them together and added to them as needed. It's rambling and repetitive, but it says everything that needs to be said and saves me a lot of time.
BUT, I also want to add in here before I paste that thing in that our project is far advanced now. Well over half done, and moving quickly. Our need for new assistants is not nearly so great as it was 4 months ago when we started all this. So at this point we only need people who are really REALLY into doing this. Will spend real time on it and get things done in a timely fashion, yet at the high quality to match our posts up till now. If you think you can really work hard on this, then by all means we'd love to have you. But we don't need any 'guess-so' helpers. People who think it might be fun to 'give it a try', or just pick at it slowly over time.
Read the directions below, and let me know if you want to try the practice chapter. If you get through to that point, you should know whether or not this task is just barrels of fun (which it is for me and all my best translators. They just love doing it), or a big pain in the ass you don't care for.
If it's the latter, PLEASE just tell me. I've had too many translators volunteer, full of fire and eagerness, and I send them all this stuff and wait and wait and write them ten times requesting updates and they just vanish on me. Drives me crazy.

Alrighty, from here on is a quote. Good reading. :)

Well! Interested in joining our cause? COOL! We could always use more help.
But before you sign your soul and all your free time over to us, why don't I give you a better idea of what exactly it is you'd be volunteering for, and then, if you're still interested, we'd love to have you on the team. ^_^

I've gone through this whole explaination thing several times over now with other prospective translators, so I'm going to save myself a lot of time and effort by simply pasting in a relevant email to someone else. Obviously, since this is written to assorted other people, it won't apply word for word to you, but it should contain within it more than enough information for you to get a VERY good idea of what it is we do. Also some of this information is out of date and no longer applies, but for the most part it's good. We can sort out any kinks later. :)
If after you read all the way through this monster below, you'd still like to help us out, then we'd love to have you. Write me back and let me know if you'd like to join, and if so, what programs if any that I talk about that you'd like me to send you.
Thanks for the email and the offer! I hope to see you on the team! ^_^
BTW: Assuming you want to join, what name would you like us to use for you on the team roster? Real names are of course acceptable but I always ask to give everyone the option to decide for themselves. :)

SHADE :)

:::From email to Jason Bridgmon:::

At 09:22 PM 4/28/99 -0600, you wrote:
>I've downloaded all the scans you've put up so far.

WOO! Hope you liked them. Judging from your offer to help I would assume so. :)

> I would love to help out with the translations.

YAY! Just what I need. ^^

> Here's what I have available so far:
>
>Celeron 300A with

Speed isn't really an issue. As long as you can run your own graphics programs it's cool. ^^

>color/BW Scanner

Unnecessary. EvlNabiki & I are doing all the scans for everyone. Not only do we both have scanners, but we have ALL the import mangas clear to the end of the series, and on top of that we are willing and in fact do break the spines of the manga books in order to get perfectly clear, straight, and clean scans. I haven't met ANYONE else who'd be willing to mangle hundreds of dollars worth of manga for this project, so we're handling that end entirely.
But that's only 20% at most of the work required for any given chapter. The rest needs to be done by our able assistants. ^_^

>Adobe Photoshop

A good graphics program is a must. I have some I could send if you didn't have this, but none of them are as good as Photoshop so I won't bother. Although if you didn't have Photoshop there are others I can send that do the trick too.

>I don't speak japanese, except I know the h looking character is
>pronounced "nn" or something.

That officially puts you one character up on me. I can't read a word of it. ^^
But that's OK, neither you nor I need to. I have translation scripts for nearly all the remaining manga. More on this below.

> I have or have access to the first 11 ranma
>novels put out from viz, and I have the ranma project translations. I
>don't have any of the japanese manga. If you have work you need or want
>me to do, I'm at your disposal.

Heheh. You may regret that offer of help! I have a bad habit of accepting such offers. ^_-

Seriously though, great to have another helper on board! We need everyone we can get. The amount of work needed is mind-numbing. Over 240 chapters as yet undone by Viz. That's why we're begging across the net for help, the scans are easy, the detailed graphics work to do the actual translation is a pain in the butt, and if just the two of us were working on it, it would take us years, probably almost as long as Viz is taking! O_O
But with enough people signed up, no single person needs to do an excessive part of the load.


Alrighty, down to business. I've gone through this whole giving directions thing with other prospective translators several times over now, so I'm going to save myself some time and effort by merely pasting in the relevant portions of emails to other people. These may not apply word for word to you, but in general they'll contain all the info you need to get an idea of what's involved, and to get started. Take this stuff as a guide, not a bible. You'll need to experiment and find the method that you feel works best for you.
If you have any further questions after this, feel free to ask me! That's what I'm here for, to organize and coordinate this whole thing. ^^

OK here we go.


:::from email to Dave Harper:::

Alrighty! Now to get cracking on the business end of this. I gather from what you said that you want to jump in at least far enough to tackle a sample chapter, which means sending you the translators starter kit. This involves seven zip files full of stuff. I've already written all this up a couple of times to other prospective translators, so I'm going to simply paste in from those emails. Realize these were written to other people so not absolutely everything in them will be directed to you personally. But all the information you need to get started should be contained within.
I'll give you two versions. The short version, and the nauseatingly excessive detail version.

:::SHORT VERSION, from email to Ed Chang:::

>i can't say i am the most skilled of image editors, but i am willing to help
>if you need the extra force...

AH! Absolutely! We can use everyone helping we can get! The scope of this project is insane. There's just SO DAMN MUCH TO DO! Esecially when you consider how many YEARS Viz has been cranking away at it, and they are not even halfway through the series. They've got almost 16 books done, with just over 22 books left!
But before I take shameless advantage of your generosity, let me give you some better detail on just what is involved in this so you can make a more informed decision. While I desperately need help on the project, I also don't want any 'guess-so' helpers. I need people dedicated to the task who derive great joy and pride from creating these works that give joy and laughter to the great masses of Ranma Fan(atic)s.
I'm assuming you don't have the import manga and a scanner. So, like my other assistants, you would not need to do any scanning. I'll be providing all the untranslated Japanese page scans for you to work on.
The translation process is deceptively simple. It actually takes much more thought than you'd expect. The basic process required of you would be this: As I give you scans, you use a graphics program to blot out the japanese text, and again using the graphics program insert the english text into the bubbles. Also doing any sound effects that can be deduced from context and you feel would aide the enjoyment of the comic by an english reader, and aren't too horribly difficult to fix. Some of them are just impossible.
Now this main step is harder than it sounds. I'll provide you with translation scripts of the mangas that will give you a good idea of what the Japanese says. You don't need to actually do any real translation of the language. BUT, the translations are not literal translations. They are a best guess paraphrase of the Japanese. Literally translated Japanese would appear to western reader as nearly gibberish, since they structure their sentences differently from the western style.
Thus, we won't be taking these paraphrased translations word for word. This is where all the thought and effort comes in. You need to read the manga pages and the translation scripts to get a sense of the spirit of each story, and each line therein. A great deal of paraphrasing and rewording will be necessary to smooth out the narrative and make it easier to read and more enjoyable to western readers. You'll find trying to marry the translation to the page precisely will render a result that doesn't seem to quite make sense in spots. Or has terribly stilted language. It doesn't have to be shakespeare, but definite attention to this concern must be paid.
Once that is done, you'll need to clean up the image itself. To fix the reading order, most of the scanned pages have been flipped horizontally. But when an actual english word is used in the original manga, they'll need to have the individual panels flipped back. And the page numbers will be flipped, so they need to be fixed. Also you'll need to do what I call 'edging'. The scanning process often introduces static and garbage around the edges of the picture where other pages got into the scan, or the scan was a bit slanted and there are black lines around the edges. Numerous things sometimes crop up that need to be fixed up to create the best possible result. I want these translations to stand up as the definitive reproduction of the Ranma manga on the net.
If you feel that your current graphics programs aren't up to this task, I can provide you with better ones. I can send you Paint Shop Pro, and a couple of viewing programs that I'm fond of to help you with the task, so you'll have the same tools I do. It's still a time consuming process, which is a concern to consider.

And all that, believe it or not, is the abbreviated version of the task. The skills needed are not so much with graphics editing, as far as that is concerned this job is very simple. Just white out and type mostly. It's the mental creativity to smooth out the words that is the major task involved.

If, with this better detailed feel for what you're signing up for, that you'd still like to help our cause, and make your mark in the Ranma Fan(atic)s world, then I'd be very happy to have you on board! If you say yes I can have programs, translations, and a practice chapter for you to try your hand at emailed to you in a matter of hours. :D :D :D

:::The Nauseatingly excessive detail version, from email to MojoBaka:::

> Bring it on.

Heh. Alrighty, you asked for it!

I'll be sending you seven zip files. The first two are graphics programs. Paint Shop Pro, I_View. Iview is mainly a viewing program, and I'm sending it cause it is very handy to have, and have some minimal use in translation.
The workhorse of the translation process will be Paint Shop Pro. This is an actual paint program that will do most of the activities necessary for doing the translations. The help files in PSP are very detailed and everything you'll need to learn to use the program is included within. I recommend unzipping and setting up each of these programs in their own little subdirectory. Then make shortcuts to each of them on your desktop. If you already have viewers and painting programs you prefer to use and feel can do the job, feel free to reject any of these.
The next three zips are an untranslated chapter of Ranma that I scanned especially for you to practice on and get used to doing translations. I'll expect you to work on this one chapter, get a feel for it, do your best, and then send it back to me translated so I can see how well you did.
The final zip is a zip full of translation scripts that you can use to know what the japanese said on the untranslated chapters. The translations have a standard naming scheme similar to the pages themselves, making it easy to figure out what is a translation for what.
The practice chapter I've sent you is Book 29, part 8. The translation for it will be in Rm29-all.txt.

Here's a basic run through on translation. Any extra details and how to use the programs you'll have to figure out largely on your own.
I'll be sending you the scans you need. I do my best to get them as ready for translation as possible, but I don't have the time to do all the polishing on the images that will ultimately be needed. More on this later.
The actual fixing process is deceptively simple. Load up each page in turn into Paint Shop Pro, using double white color and the 'solid box' tool, blot out the japanese text from each of the word bubbles. Also as many sound effects as you think are easy to guess at, and aren't imbedded into the artwork. The translation scripts don't make any mention of sound effects, so any you try will have to be done entirely from context. This one is completely at your discretion to try. Any that look easy and you think would help the enjoyment of the chapter for the readers, give it your best guess.
I prefer to blot out each bubble one at a time and replace the text before moving on. I don't blot out every bubble on a page first. Although I can't read the Japanese, the spacing and punctuation of the original, like two characters, comma, 8 characters, exclaimation point, etc, helps make easier figuring out the original intent of a word bubble.
Then as each bubble is clear, switch over to the translation script, and find the appropriate spot and figure out what the Japanese said. THIS is where the surprisingly difficult part comes in.
For starters, the translations we have are NOT literal word for word translations of the Japanese. I don't know how much you know about Japanese but they order their sentence structure differently from English, and hence literal translations would appear to be nearly nonsensical gibberish to us. Hence the translations we have are paraphrased. You'll be needed to paraphrase it even further.
You see, you can't just slavishly adhere to what the translation script says. That's just an approximation. Also, if you blindly fill in what the translation says word for word, you'll find in many places it doesn't seem to quite make sense, or it is stilted and doesn't flow well for an english reader. What we're aiming for here is for you to read the translation a bit ahead, get an idea of where each page fits in the larger scheme of the chapter, and the spirit intended for each bubble, and rewording things as best you can to make them flow well, be humorous, and still maintain the integrity of the storyline. It's trickier than it seems really.
There is an easy way for you to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Included in the zip of translation scripts are the scripts that *I* used to do the book 17 translations that have already been posted and that you should now have. For demonstrative purposes, compare the original script that I used to the actual words that ended up in the word bubbles. You'll find most often they are exactly the same, or nearly so, when making them the same helped the story, but in some places they are paraphrased, or nearly discarded altogether for something I felt fit what was really on the page better, while maintaining the spirit of the scene. Take a look at it and learn what you can from it. ((Addendum to this: I now paraphrase even more heavily now than I did then. Rarely will any line longer than three words make it intact from the script to the page. There is almost ALWAYS a better way to say something, so give it as much thought as you can. Don't be concerned with preserving even a single word of the script, but by the same token don't be afraid to say things the same way. We don't change things solely for the sake of changing them, but rarely is there no way that changing it at least a bit won't help. Use your own discretion on this and find a balance that you are comfortable with.))
In paint shop pro, when using the 'add text' tool, I suggest you use the Comic Sans MS type face, in whatever size that's appropriate to the space it needs to go in. Comic Sans MS looks great and has a size range from supertiny to megahuge for chapter titles. Although again, don't be afraid to experiment and find the typefaces that you like, or find humorous in any situation. As always, experiment, find what works for you and creates a final result you're proud to put your name on. In addition to fixing the text, there is some polishing to the actual image that will be required.
There are two major sections to polishing. Edging and flipping errors.
When I scan these pages, I do my very best to get the manga books perfectly flat on the scanner, but they're 190 pages thick, it's really impossible to get every page perfect. And often they'll be little black splotches around the edges of a picture, or on the sides little pieces of the next page over that I couldn't cut entirely out. You'll have to zoom in on these areas, using erase or white block tool to neatly excise these leftover bits out of a scene. We want smooth, clear pages that will stand up as the definitive online scans. Use your own discretion on this, just make them look as good as possible. For the practice chapter I sent you it was in the middle of the book, so I did a much better than usual job of getting the scans straight and clean, so you won't have to do much of this. But in the future you may not get so lucky. Edging can often be very thin, obscure black lines along the edges of the image, making them hard to spot sometimes. You'll have to look closely to really spot them. As a general rule, any page that has artwork running off the side is going to need help, if it's all boxes it's a fair bet it's clean.

((Addendum to this: Not a single translator has yet to successfully spot edging errors in the practice chapter on their first try, so I'm going to paste in my critique on that point for the practice chapter, so you can get a clearer idea of precisely what I mean by this ahead of time.
First off, you seem to have neglected what I call 'edging'. Let me give you some good examples of this from the sample chapter you have so you can see what I mean: Page119: Thin black lines along the upper right side, and along the bottom on the left. Page120: Black line along the bottom of the page. In situations like that I tend to leave the line intact underneath the box that runs off the bottom of the page, and neatly snip it out on either side.
Page127: VERY noticeable black line running along the lower right side.
Things like that. You'll find at least a tiny bit of help is needed on more pages than not, and some pages need lots of help, depending on how tricky the scan was for that particular page. Take a look and you'll see what I mean.))

Flipping errors. You may or may not know this, but Japanese books read opposite ours. They read right to left, and from our perspective back to front. Which means that on any page where there is more than one panel across, in Japanese order you'd read the right panel first, then left, etc. This can create a lot of confusion to english readers who aren't expecting it. So, in order to correct this problem, all pages I send you except for the title page of each chapter are flipped horizontally to correct the reading order problem.
This creates some new problems that you'll be expected to fix. For starters, all page numbers will be backwards. You'll have to flip them back straight. On most pages, that'll be the only flipping required. Sometimes though, they'll be actual english words in the original manga page, like the door signs on the Tendo girls' doors, the 1-F for the homeroom sign at their school, or english signs on stores in the backgrounds (this last one is up to you to attempt, if a sign is angled or embedded in the scene to a point where it'd be impossible to flip back effectively, and the whole panel can't be effectively flipped without ruining another piece of the scene, you can just leave it).
Take a look at each page and do these things in whatever order you feel will be the easiest and most effective to the goal of creating the best looking translation possible. Naturally it'll take a lot of thought for each page and chapter to produce a smoothly flowing, easily readable, and very enjoyable final result.
Of course, on the other hand, we're not getting paid for this, so if someone doesn't like what we think is good enough, fuck 'em. >:P ^_-

Oh, one final thing about about this. In regards to picture quality. Paint Shop Pro saves jpg files at 100% quality, zero compression or picture loss. This means that as you save and resave each picture as you work on it, the program will make the files HUGE. 3-4 times as big as they were when I sent them to you, but they'll stay looking good. When you get through a chapter, use I_View to scan through the pages, check each one out, read through the chapter like you were a reader seeing it for the first time, make all final correction you want. I_View makes this easy, just load up the first image, and hit space bar, and you'll cycle forward alphabetically through the images.
Once you're satisfied with your work, load each image up in I_View, and then resave it over itself. Set I_View's compression at 80% and it will drop the file size back to what it was when I sent it to you.

(addendum to this: By the same token, when you are working on a page and saving it over and over again, you need to save it at 100% or as close as the program will allow, to prevent picture degredation. Only resave at 80% when you are done making changes, Paint shop pro 5 has a starting setting of about 80% compression, so check your settings and make sure it's on absolute mininum compression. Use I_View to save at 80% and drop the size back down when you're finished. At least that's how I do it.) (addendum #2: This has changed because of our project gif conversion. Attached at bottom details on this.)

If you have any further questions, feel free to mail me and ask. Looking forward to working with you Mojo. ^_^

Seven zip files to follow immediately after this email. Collect them all! Trade with your friends! ^_-

::::::

Whew! Glad I didn't have to type that monster out all over again. Took me two hours+ to do it the first go round.

An addition to the directions above. For the title page of each chapter you do, put in a credit for yourself just like the ones you see on the chapters I've been posting.
Something like:
Translation by: Jason Bridgmon (jbridgmo@du.edu)
Or however you'd like to have your credit read. Then, drop the typeface down a few points, and put a credit in underneath yours for:
Scans by: EvlNabiki & SHADE (gurf@erols.com)
That will clearly express right in the text the greater effort that will be put into the chapter by you. ^_^

I'll be sending you a bunch of zips shortly. I won't be sending you Paint Shop Pro, since you said you had photoshop and that's probably way better than what I'm using anyway. But I'll send you the translation scripts, I_View, the practice chapter, and a listing of all the Ranma manga chapters so you can decide which ones you'd like to tackle after the practice chapter, and we can all keep track of who's doing what. :)

Glad to have you on board, Jason!

>Jason Bridgmon
>University of Denver, Denver Colorado, U.S.A.

:::::

The New Ranma 1/2 Project Team:
235 Chapters to start, 147 Done, 88 To Go

Selfishly putting ourselves up top cause it was our idea:
SHADE & EvlNabiki------------21 Chapters

Our helpful web guys:
Wei Jing Guo, Dark Alpha

Our multilingual script writer guy:
Shih-Schon Lin

Our diligent and underpaid translators:
Kyle Emmerson----------------22 Chapters
Rajesh Chopdekar-------------17 Chapters
Jason Bridgmon---------------14 Chapters
AnimeBill--------------------13 Chapters
Dark Alpha-------------------7 Chapters
Lockeheed Dragon-------------7 Chapters
...sage----------------------6 Chapters
Jessica Platon---------------6 Chapters
Doug_W-----------------------5 Chapters
Tom Lee----------------------5 Chapters
DarkAsh----------------------4 Chapters
MojoBaka----------(Retired)--4 Chapters
TomCat-----------------------4 Chapters
Baladen----------------------3 Chapters
Gary Kleppe------------------3 Chapters
[--==>RaNMa<==--]------------2 Chapters
Dave Peterson----------------1 Chapter
RyogaSama--------------------1 Chapter
Scuttle----------------------1 Chapter
Willy Tanuwidjaja-(Retired)--1 Chapter

Working on their first chapter:
Denise D.

Apprentice Translators:
Angel of Loneliness
Jingamma
randomErr
Silver Wolf

BTW: You lose the 'apprentice' part of the title when I get the practice chapter back. ^_^

SHADE :)

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Appendix B: The translators starter kit Intro
APPENDIX B: The Starter Kit intro. If a new recruit survived The Directions, I sent them a pack of zips with programs and information to get them started. Those zips were prefaced by this intro.

Alrighty, I'm about to send you a bunch of zips. Here's a description and instruction on what's coming:

To start, the graphics app I advise you to use is PAINT SHOP PRO 5.03, this is a FANTASTIC graphics app that does anything you could possibly need for this job.

I_View300.zip: My favorite viewer. Fast, powerful, easy. Basic commands are: Space bar=cycle forward through images in that directory. Backspace=Cycle backwards. Enter=Full screen image. F=fit image to desktop. Keypade + and - keys=scale image up or down 10% each keypress. B=start batch conversion. I recommend setting this program as your default image viewer when double-clicking a file. But that bit is optional if you prefer something else. ^_^

RanT's.zip: This is the zip with all the translation scripts. Right here let me say something, I CANNOT STRESS THIS POINT ENOUGH, that these scripts are ONLY GUIDES to use in translations, because we can't read japanese. The scripts will clue you in to what the original Japanese said, but the scripts are themselves are only paraphrasing the original, and often written by people who did not necessarily have a perfect command of both English and Japanese.
So we will be heavily paraphrasing the script, rewording things so they flow better and are more humorous and more enjoyable for western readers. Don't concern yourself about preserving a single word of the scripts, say things in a way that you think works best for the story and the readers who will ultimately see it.

Ranma Manga.txt: This file lists all the chapters of the Ranma manga, who's done what, who's working on what, what's left to be done. It's the master list to keep track of everything, and hence needs to be updated periodically. I'm giving you a chapter right now, but this will be the only chapter that I 'assign' you, it's for practice. After you finish this one and I critique it, you'll have to choose for yourself which chapters you'd like to tackle for your official chapters. Use this file in conjunction with the script files to figure out what is what, and what you would like to work on.
Give me a clear point to start the scans, and far enough ahead that I can keep you well supplied and there won't be any lag time. The longest queue I have right now is 13 chapters, the shortest about 4. If you really don't care which ones you do, I can just send you ones that are available, but I always give you the option of picking which ones you want first.

RM29-08a.zip:
RM29-08b.zip: These two zips contain the practice chapter for you. This chapter is for you to cut your teeth on, get a solid foundation on just what is needed to do these translations the best way possible, and to experiment and find the best process that works for you personally. The Directions explaination that I gave you is only a guide, the way *I* personally do it. For everyone I'm sure there are slightly different ways to do it that you'll find more to your liking, or you feel creates a better final result. Play with it, have fun with it, that is after all what this is all about. ^_^

jpg5a.zip: This is our special gif converter that smooths the images down to just the colors that are really there (B&W +4 grays), and reduces the file size by half. Great little program. You should have a copy of my email to the team on the subject of gif conversion at the end of The Directions file.

SHADE

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Appendix C: Project conversion email (team version)
APPENDIX C: The conversion email (team version). When we made our big switchover from jpg to gif for final pages (although working pages still had to be jpg for color depth and antialiasing issues), this is the email I sent around to everyone explaining it.

Hello everyone!!!
I've got some very important news for you all! But this will take a little explaining to do so please bear with me (Wei Jing you already know about this, and Shih-Schon this won't really affect you).
From the very beginning of our Project, EvlNabiki & I have been striving to find the best format to use for our scans. Now, from a logical understanding of how image formats work, the best choice would seem to be the GIF file format. Gif is made for line art and drawings like we're working on, while jpg is really more meant for photographs.
Unfortunately, every attempt we made to make these images into gifs failed miserably. If any of you saw our project from day one, you might have seen the first three chapters I posted (before I redid and reposted them) in our early attempts at gif, where we tried to convert the pages manually into low-color gifs. Not only did it take forever, but it looked AWFUL!
We finally had to give up on that and go to jpg, and since then, any attempt to convert our pages into gif has only made them 2-4 time BIGGER than they were as jpgs! The cause of this was that they were being converted into 256 grays, and had lots of color static and wasted detail. But we could never find any way around it. You see, the original pages we are scanning just don't have that much information on them. The original prints are essentially Black & White, with about 4 levels of gray in the middle. But since we couldn't really scan them that way (we tried, never could figure out how), we were kind of stuck for it.
BUT! Wei Jing Guo has acquired from a helpful fan, and hence given to me, a simple and effective solution!
The program is called djpeg.exe, its a DOS (BLECK!) program, but it's great at what it does. It decompresses the jpegs, smooths the image down to just the colors that are really there (B&W +4 grays), and converts it to gif in the process, which ultimately cuts the file size of each page just about in HALF. And if you compare them side to side, you'd be hard pressed to find even the slightest difference in what the pages look like. It's really quite amazing.
SO! Armed with this new program, we're doing a complete conversion to .gif for all finalized pages. What this means for all of you that there will be one small extra step involved in translating, but it should drastically cut down email transmission time, so I think in the final result it should speed things up.
Barring any unexpected complications, this how I foresee it working:

1. EvlNabiki and I scan things as normal, getting everything ready as we have before, and then, before we send you a chapter, we will run it through the converter and send you the gif files. This should cut upload and download times in half.
2. When you receive them, you'll need to convert them back to jpg in order to work on them. Because they are composed of so few colors, it is likely that trying to work on them in that format will disable certain useful functions, first and foremost would be antialiasing when laying down text (I tried this in Paint shop pro so I know for certain that in that program at least, a picture must have far more colors to use antialiasing). BUT, you should already have a simple program to perform this task. I sent all of you I_VIEW, I hope you kept it, cause it'll do this in no time flat. All you have to do is load up I_VIEW, hit "B", for batch conversion, select the gifs I sent you, tell it to convert them to jpg, and it'll do them all. An important note on this, it is ESSENTIAL that when you are setting up the batch conversion, that in the options you set the save quality for it's highest level, meaning perfect quality and zero compression, in order to pretect the image quality of the page. This will make the images HUGE, 3-400k each, but once you're done you won't have to keep them that way.

3. Working on the jpg copies, do the translation normally, and then, when you're finished, run the completed pages through the converter before sending them to me. I'm sending all of you a zip file attached to this email. It contains several little programs, but the one we're principally concerned with is djpeg.exe.
Here is how you use it. Move or copy the djpeg.exe program into a temporary directory, and then copy all the image files you want to convert into the same directory. Then open an MS-DOS box (EEEEK! ^_-), go to that directory, and type this precise command:

djpeg -color 8 -dither none -gif *.jpg

This should start a batch conversion of all files in that directory with the .jpg extension. If you want to do just one file in particular, replace the * with the name of the file you want to convert. This should cut the size of each page down dramatically. I usually got around 50% of the size it was as a jpg at 80% quality, and 25% the size of a jpg at 100% quality.
Then of course send the final gifs back to me, once again cutting upload and download times in half.

ISN'T THAT HANDY?!?!?!
I compared over a hundred pages before and after this conversion process, and the difference is so small as to typically be unnoticeable. I'm really thrilled to finally have a way to properly present the colors on the actual page and nothing else. This is also a really good fix for the gamma problems we've had up till now. Double whammy solution! :D
One note on this, if anyone tries to do something unusual, like Kyle Emmerson's colorized page, DON'T run it through the gif converter, it'll really mangle the image.

If any of you have any problems or questions about this whatsoever, feel free to ask away. I'm sure we can sort out any difficulties and get this all running smoothly and better than ever! YAY! ^_^

Thanks for your attention! Hope to hear from all of you soon! ^_^

SHADE

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Appendix D: i_view revised directions
APPENDIX D: i_view revised Direction. Very near the end of the project, we discovered that the latest versions of i_view can do all the same things that djpeg did, but even faster and without having to muck around with a DOS program. Here are the directions that I wrote to Dave Peterson on this subject.

ALRIGHTY!
When doing Ranma pages and converting them back and forth between gif and jpg using I_View, this is the process you need to use to do them at zero picture degredation.

:::Gif to jpg:::

Load up the I_View program, and hit 'B' for batch conversion. This will bring up a new window with various settings. In the upper right window you'll need to navigate to where your original scan gif pages are, select them all, and add them to the batch set. Adding them will move them over to the upper left window.
Along the bottom you'll see an option for file type, which should probably already say jpeg files, but if it doesn't, you'll need to change it. Next to the file type setting is a button for 'options'. Click on that and make sure that the 'Save Quality' setting is pushed all the way up to 100. This will make a huge file, but it'll be crystal clear and high color so you can work with it.
Also remember to set your output directory so you know where the program put the output files. Also make sure that the output directory isn't the same directory where the original are, cause the program overwrites files without asking.
Don't forget whenever you resave a file while working on it, it also has to be at 100%.

Once the pages have been finished, I_View can once again be used to return the final pages to gif with zero loss of picture quality.

:::jpg to Gif:::

This process starts the same as gif to jpg. Load up, hit 'B', and select all the finished pages and add them to the batch.
Obviously this time you'll need to change the output file type to gif. Since this is a gif, the save quality setting doesn't apply.
Here is where things start getting different. Along the bottom right of the batch window, there is a button for 'advanced options'. Hit that. This will bring up a new window with lots of neato things you can do to your files during the batch conversion.
The main concern in this window is the color depth. The color depth options are along the lower left side of the advanced options window. Select 'Custom' for color depth, and enter into the window '8', for 8 colors. That's all we'll need for this. As it is that's more colors than exist in the original page.
For most conversions that's all you need to do. Close the advanced window and start the batch. BUT, since you're working on the scans at their original scan size, you can also use this batch function to reduce the pages down to their final size of 800 pixels across. In the upper left of the advanced options you can set reduction sizes. The only size you enter is the 800 width, and then click on both 'Use Resample' and 'preserve aspect ratio', and that'll make the shrink down very smooth, and the program will figure out the appropriate height distance automatically.
NOTE: Do NOT use the shrink down function of I_View if you've already converted the pages in a seperate step. It needs to all be done in one big conversion. If the 8-color pages go through the I_View reduction, the low color settings will mangle the image.

And then send the finished gifs to me! Easy as can be. :D

SHADE :)

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Appendix E: Manga editing tips email
APPENDIX E: Manga Editing Tips email. About 2/3rds through the project, several of our translators had switched to doing 100% translations including all sound effects. Even some not doing 100% were trying things harder than they'd done before. This is the email I wrote to the whole team, giving all the graphics editing advice I could think of.

HELLO AGAIN EVERYONE!
I've had quite a few people on the project ask me for tips on how to edit the Ranma pages, and more specifically those tricky sound effects in the background for those trying to do a really complete translation.
So many people have asked for hints that I decided it would be more efficient for me to just write one email to everyone on the subject. For some of you this will all be repeat, but I'm sending it to everyone just in case.
Finally, these tips are all specific for use on Paint Shop Pro, cause that's the program I use. For anyone using other programs, like Photoshop, quite likely there will be a similar function in it, but you'll have to figure the corrolations out on your own. Also I've got to warn you this email is INCREDIBLY long. Unless you're really interested in this information, you can feel free to skip it. It contains nothing but graphics editing tips.
Wei Jing and Shih-Schon you can both ignore this message entirely. Doesn't really effect you.

Alrighty!
When starting a page, I always clear out the edges first. I find the easiest way to do this is with the 'shapes' tool. That tool looks like a little hollow box at the very bottom of the tool bar. Set your foreground color for white, and just draw long, thin boxes up and down the edges of the page, quickly and easily wiping out all the leftover bits on the side. It's alright to lose a few pixels of the art, no one will ever miss them.
If there are backwards page numbers or book numbers, they need to be flipped back to straight. To do this requires the 'selection tool'. That tool looks like the shapes tool, except it's a box made up of a dotted line. You draw a selection box around the numbers, then hit CONTROL + M, for mirror selected error. That'll reverse the numbers back to straight.
We try to replace the kanji characters in the Ranma book numbers that appear along the top of some pages. We pick random neat looking fonts, cut out those first two characters, and replace them with 'Ranma'. The font size of 36 fits the size of the rest of the book number most precisely.
Up next, is the question of the dialogue bubbles.
If you look at our pages for book 38, we've always strived to get the dialogue to fit as precisely as possible into the bubble it's supposed to go in. Especially with very narrow bubbles, which you get a lot since japanese and chinese is written vertically, it can be very hard. Leading to a lot of people to use a lot of hyphens or turn words on their side, which we try to avoid.
But in PSP there's a simple solution to all these problems. It's called the 'deformation tool'. The tool looks like a little tic tac toe board or target site, it's right underneath the magnifying glass tool. When you use the text tool, all you need to do is type in the text you want in a rough approximation of the shape of the dialogue bubble. Once the text appears on the page, it should appear as a 'floating selection', with the glowing selection border hugging the letters perfectly. Once you have anything surrounded by a selection border, the deformation tool becomes available.
What it allows you to do is squeeze, stretch, and rotate anything selected till it perfectly fits into the space you need it to fit into. This is also very handy for angling text that needs to fit on a surface that isn't perfectly horizontal, like a Panda sign, or a sign in the background. This is an extremely useful tool you should all play around with. It'll come in handy for other things too.
One rule to keep in mind when using resizing or the deformation tool, always create text or sound effects significantly larger than you need them, and then shrink them down. Don't start small and enlarge them, cause that'll create very soft, fuzzy edges to whatever text you're laying down.
Also, my personal choice for dialogue text font is "Comic Sans MS". It looks just like the font Viz uses, and is very easy to read. If anyone wants to use this font but doesn't have it, just ask me and I'll send it to you. ^_^

Now for the most basic translations, that's all you need. But a number of people have been trying to tackle those really tricky sound effects buried in the artwork in the background. Those are an entire other level of difficulty, and I'll address them now.
Right off, there are the simple sound effects. Any sound effect that appears mostly or entirely against a white background is almost as simple as dialogue to replace. Just wipe it clean and right in a new sound effect in whatever font you like. Once again the deformation tool comes in VERY handy here. Allowing you to quickly and intuitively rotate your sound effect to match the rotation of the original, and fit it in neatly without having to guess at the rotation over and over again. Just swing it around till it looks right, and hit 'apply' to make it stick. Also, just like with the dialogue bubbles, start things larger than you need them, then use the deformation tool to shrink them down into size. Now you can rotate and shrink them into shape in one simple step! :D
Next up is the really tricky stuff. Trying to get sound effects and titles to smooth integrate into art-heavy backgrounds. This can be very hard and require quite a bit of trickery. This will get a bit complicated, so I'll go through how we do it step by step. Obviously always feel free to experiment with this stuff to find your own favored way.
First off, we must get rid of the original sound effect. There's no way to avoid this or automate it to any great degree, it's simple a matter of zooming way in on the sound effect (zooming being that magnifying glass tool), and using the single paint brush tool, and as wide a paint area as you can, neatly white out the original sound effect as precisely as possible without messing up the art around it.
A point here, always play with the size and settings on your tool control. There is the 'control box' for most of the painting tools, that you have to open to play with tool settings. If you've never tried to open the controls box, you can toggle it off and on with the button to the left or above of the little rainbow in the options bar (that being the OTHER control bar besides the tools bar).
Anyway, once the original sound effect has been whited out, you'll be left with the obvious problem of the sound effect-shaped white scar it leaves across the artwork. Dealing with this is quite tricky.
First off, for the parts that were carved out of pure black areas, that's easy. Use the regular paint tool, black color, and fill in that space with black up as close as you can do any white or patterned areas the black runs up against. If it's a large black area you can speed this up by using the shaptes tool and draw big black boxes over those areas. For white areas that's easy you just blank them out and that's it.
It gets hard when patterns come into the equation. The way I usually deal with patterns is to find another area that has the same type of pattern, and use the 'area copy' tool. This tool looks like a double paintbrush, just under the regular paint brush. The way it works is you use the controls box to set the paint size you want, then RIGHT click on the area you want to copy from, and then left click in the spot you want to copy to, and duplicate the pattern over the new spot.
Absolute perfection is hopefully not required on this, cause you can use the new sound effect you'll be putting over the area to cover up places where the patterns and the solid black and white colors don't seem to quite match up perfectly. You only need to create the IMPRESSION that the pattern continues seamlessly behind the sound effects, you don't actually need to draw them in perfectly.
Another problem you may encounter when snipping out the japanese sound effects is that they'll slice through lines in the art. I don't know about you, but I can't draw a straight line freehand to save my life. But PSP has a great line tool. The line drawing tool is quite easy to spot, it's just a dash or straight line just above the shapes drawing tool. Using the controls box, you can set the line width you need, and whether the line is 'normal' or 'bezier'. Normal is obviously just a straight line you start where you want it, and then drag it to where you want it to end. Bezier lines are trickier, but make drawing smooth curves easy. You lay them out like a normal line, but then you can 'bend' them in the middle. The way it works is that you click twice on the line. Each click allows you to pull the line out of shape, until you find the curve you want. You need to click toward the lines starting point first, then toward the finishing point to define your curve. This one is mighty tricky to master, but with a little practice you can get the hang of it.
So using the line tool you can fill the borken lines back in. You'll probably have to be a lot more precise fixing the lines than fixing the patterns, cause sometimes cut lines are way off to the side and can't be practically covered up by the new sound effect.
In rare instances sound effects will be against a random seeming 'fuzz background'. For an example of this consult page RM38-036. For such problems using the area copy tool will be far less effective or convincing. For such problems using the 'airbrush tool' is the solution we employ. The airbrush tool looks like a little aerosol spray can on the tool bar. Using the control box you can adjust the density and speed of the air brush effect. We usually have at a pretty sparse setting (Opacity: 28 Density: 13 Steps: 28), that allows us to brush over and area over and over again, and gradually build up the fuzzy dark and light areas in a way that better match the background.

OK! Finally there's the big important final step, actually putting in the new sound effect. With the stuff you've done from above, you should now have moved in the edges of a sound effect scar as close to each other as you practically can without really amazing drawing talent (which I personally don't have at all).
Putting sound effects over the artwork introduces a new problem. When laying text against the artwork, the sides of the letters will blend into the artwork wherever it's black. As any of you that have looked at our book 38 pages can see, the solution to the problem is to create a clean white border around the letters before pasting them into the area you need. Here's how we do it:
First off you, need to create a new, blank image to work with, seperate from the active page. When you're ready to create your new sound effect, you write it into the blank page first. Leave the text in the floating selection phase so you can play with it. Then you go to the options row along the top and click on 'Selection', then 'Modify', then 'expand'. If you want to do this quickly the keyboard command for it is ALT-S-M-E, and then select how many pixels you want your white border to be. For small sound effects, 1 or 2 pixels will do, for really big ones, sometimes 3, 4 or even 5 pixels wide. Remember you want to start larger and then shrink to fit.
If your sound effect is going to end up being a simple straight line, then this is all you need to do. Grow the selection to take in some of the white around it, then hit CONTROL+C for copy, move to your page in progress, and hit CONTROL+E, for paste as a floating selection. And bingo your new sound effect appears over your page. Use the deformation tool to rotate, squeeze, and stretch it till it all fits perfectly.
To cover up the most territory, and hide our trickery with the backgrounds, we use very thick fonts, with lots of thick black lines and very little white space to show through to what we're trying to hide. Typically we use either 'Comicbook', or my new favorite, 'Boink LET'. If you don't have these fonts and would like to have them, just ask and I'll send them.
OK, that's for simple straight line sound effects. But sometimes it's harder than that. If you have a very oddly shaped area of art that you want to cover up with your sound effect, you'll have to do the sound effect one letter at a time, and paste each one of them in precisely, deforming and rotating each one to get it right where you need it to cover up whatever it is you're hiding.
The way we do this is to start in our clean seperate page, and write in the letters we need with a space between each of them. Then we undo the selection, and make a new selection box all the way around the letter we want to use. Then we hit CONTROL+T, for 'set transparent color'. For us we use the background color, which for us is white, as the transparent color. What this does is cut all the white out of the selection area, and create a selection area that perfectly hugs the letter you want to play with. Then you can expand the selection to get a white border just like you did before, and cut and paste in that one letter and play with it however you need.
Another variant you can play around with in this is if you want to have a hollow font. That is a hollow black outline of a letter surrounding a white center. Good examples of this can be found on pages RM38-041 & RM38-042. There are two easy ways to accomplish this effect. You can create a seperate page, using black as your background color, then write your letters in white, expand the selection as you did before, and paste that into your page. Or you can start on your white page, write in black, expand the selection, then at the top select 'Color' and the 'Negative image'. This will reverse all the colors in the selected area, turning your black with white border letters into black around hollow white centers letters. Either will work perfectly well.
Finally, sometimes you might want to bend and twist your sound effects for humorous or dramatic effects. Two good examples of this can be found on page RM38-013. Here's how we do that. Just with the other sound effects, we write them first into the clean seperate page. Then we draw one large box around all the letters we wish to play with. PSP cannot deform the selection areas along with the letters inside them so you need a large selected area around the letters so your distortion effects have room to take effect. So once you have the letters all surrounded by a big box, you go back to the top and select 'IMAGE' and then 'DEFORMATIONS'. You can select one deformation, or use the deformation browser to cycle through them till you find one you like. Using those deformations you can accomplish a variety of neat effects, playing around with the letters in all the open room of your blank page. I won't bother to explain what all the deformations do, just experiement with them on your own.
Once you've played with your letters to your hearts delight, make a big box around them, and once again use the transparent color command to get a selection area that perfectly hugs your letters, expand the selection to get a white border if you feel such a border is necessary, or reverse the letters with negative image if that's the effect you desire, copy and paste into your page, and use the deformation tool to rotate and squeeze into the perfect place you want.

WHEW! Gyah I've been working on this email for 3 1/2 hours! o_O
I DO rattle on endlessly, don't I? ^^;;;
Well anyway, I hope this satisfies all the questions everyone was asking me about how to accomplish certain effects during the editing process. If anyone has any further questions, or needs clarification on any of the techniques I outlined above, feel free to ask me!

SHADE :)

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Appendix F: History and methods of Scanning email
APPENDIX F: History and Methods of Manga Scanning email. This is a recent addition that I wrote up just in the last couple of days in response to a question asked by Bryan Porter, one of our most vocal fans. He was trying to duplicate our sharp results in scanning manga, and was having trouble with it. Here is my reply:

>> >Bryan

>I do have one separate question. You mention in your intros that >one of your helpers pointed out some things you were doing wrong >with the scans so you went back and redid them. *What* did you >change? I've been making some attempts at scanning in manga >and the results have been less than optimal. B&W and greyscale >scans seem to be a lot harder to get right than color. Color is >much more forgiving.

Oh dear. That's a complicated story. Hope you've got a while to listen to me babble about history. ^^
If you don't care about history and just want to skip to the final process, I've written the final process down at the bottom. Even that is pretty long all by itself.
When we first started in February, we were new to scanning in general, and were just toying around with it mostly. Took a lot of experimentation to end up with the process that gives us the very clean scans we have today.
Realize that everything I say here is tailored to our scanners and our programs. I don't know what kind of machine you have so it may not work exactly the same way.
Anyway, (enter big booming voice from the sky) IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS MANGA, AND SCANNER, AND LITTLE CLUE WHAT THE HELL WE WERE DOING. ^_-
We started scanning with flat settings on the scanner. That means we didn't change anything, and just let it scan things in as close to actual reproduction as possible. Unfortunately, this is a very bad idea of B&W&Gray manga. Right off the bat, you get a very light bleed-through problem, where you see light shadows of the backing pages showing through your page cause of the intensely bright light involved in the scanning. Also they're HUGE! Like 2 megs per page! (my scanner automatically saves things to jpg format at 100% quality.
Also with the basic scan method, white is not quite white, black is not quite black, and everything looks a bit fuzzy and less than ideal. Our first try at fixing this was to take each page, and first convert them to gifs (256 color gifs was all we could do at the time), still huge size. Then we took them into Neopaint, which is a crappy old dos program, and converted them down to 16-colors greyscale. The conversion never was really good, and it turned all those 'almost white' light gray bleed-throughs into an amorphous gray fuzz that spackled the whole page. Also black wasn't really black, but 5 layers of almost-black. What we did was, one page at a time, manual adjust the palette so the bottom two layers of almost white were really white, the top three layers of black were really black, and then reload the palette and NOT adjust for the change. This reset the colors so the background was really white, black was black, etc. This is NOT the method you want to use. First off, it takes FOREVER! One page at a time, with loads of monotonous, repetitive crap. And the result is mediocre at best. Lose a LOT of resolution. Playing with the settings in such a manual, haphazard way produces passable results, but not ideal. Nothing even close to the crystal clean reproduction we got later.
Enter attempt #2!
From there, we abandoned gifs and moved on to working with jpgs. They were big, but not unmanageably big.
The only way to move on to the jpgs was to somehow manage to create the same effects of white is really white and black is really black that we'd done manually before right in the scanning stage.

:::Big rule #1::: Always try to create as much of your final desired result right in the scanner. Adjusting it later is never the ideal way to do it.

Here's how we finally cracked the white is white and bleed-through problems. In our scanner program there are all sorts of settings for exposure, color, gamma, all that fun stuff. We started by cranking up the exposure setting to 140%. What that does is create a very light scan. It eliminates the bleed-through, cause it shifts everything very toward white. So white is really white, but all blacks are now a fuzzy icky gray.
The way to beat THAT is to drop the gamma way down. We can do this right in our scanners using the gamma adjustment setting. Gamma is different from brightness. Brightness would make your nice clean white an icky gray, but if your high exposure creates really pure white color, the gamma will leave it white. We dropped the gamma down to 40%. What that did was blend the fuzzy gray way down till in melded into one color again, seeming to be solid black again.
Now there is one serious problem with this. That 'apparent black' isn't REALLY black. It's actually 20 different levels of almost black, created by gamma trickery. For the first 1/3 of our project, we had a constant problem with this cause we left things in jpg format. You see, gamma settings are different on everyone's computer. It's created by a weird combination of monitor, video card, and internal software settings. So what looked like true black on my machine, might still be fuzzy gray on someone else's machine. Or even superblack, dark and fuzzy with light gray details destroyed. This was a thorn in our side for a long time.
Finally the way we cracked it was by our gif conversion. We knew all along that the ideal format for our scans was gif, not jpg. Gifs are meant for low color, line-art style drawings, exactly like we've been working on. But every attempt we made to convert failed cause we didn't know how to drop the color depth of the scans. When we converted them it made them into 256 color gifs. So instead of blending the 20-levels of almost-black into one true color, it left them intact, and just made the pictures even bigger, solving nothing.
You see, there just isn't that much information on the pages we're scanning. The Ranma manga is actually printed in B&W plus about 4 levels of gray. All other apparent shading is created by illusionary patterns in the artwork that trick the eye into seeing shading that isn't really there.
The crack to this was the jpg to gif conversion utility we discovered. We started doing this with a dos program, but we later discovered we could do the same thing even more easily with the latest versions of our favorite viewer, I_View32 (version 3.0 or 3.5). We drop the color depth to a scant 8 colors. Which is actually 2 more than are even really there. But we create some artificial layers of gray by shrinking the pages down. Which leads me into:

:::Big Rule #2::: Always scan big, REALLY big, and then shrink down later. Everything always looks better in the shrink-down. Standard scan size for us is 300dpi.

SO! Here comes the final process. This'll get pretty detailed.

1: We start in the scanner. To eliminate page-fuzz and bleed through and to create true whites, we crank up scan exposure to 140%. To compensate for the light gray blacks this creates, we drop our gamma correction down to 40%. Note: at least in our scanner equipment, we needed to reset the gamma settings each time we started a new batch of scans and then drop it down again. Gamma seems to be sensitive to the color levels on the preview page, so the settings from your previous batch of scans can mess up a new batch if you don't reset it and drop it down again before each new round of scanning.
Note2: To save time, we only made one initial preview scan of the chapter we were scanning in order to properly calibrate the gamma settings mentioned above. Then we made one big selection area that would definitely get the entire page plus plenty on the sides. That way we could sweep the selection area from one side to the other, moving the book to match, and get each page one after another just scan, scan, scan, without wasting time on preview pages. The excess can be cropped out later, and that takes less time that previewing every page and carefully placing a precise scan area.

2: Scan all the pages at once. One after another, moving your selection area, so the settings stay consistent. Get the whole chapter either right or wrong at once. ^_- Once you experiment with it a while you should be able to do this confidently. Remember the settings I give you may not be right for your machine. They are what we personally used. Oh yeah make sure you set your scanner to scan in grayscale when you're scanning grayscale images. It may seem the same to have color on, but it isn't. And grayscale will probably be 10 times faster. It sure is on our machine.

3: Take the scanned pages and pull them into a paint program of some kind. Load them all up, and crop out as much of the excess junk around the edges as possible. I use Paint Shop Pro for this. Great program. Remember when saving jpg's that you always save them at 100% quality until you're done with them, or the quality will degrade FAST.

4: For us at this point there would only be one step left. But depending on how you do things, it may be more complex for you. The next step is to shrink down your pages to the final size you want to use. Important note on this: Whenever you are reducing pages, only do it when the source material is a jpg. The low colors of the compressed gifs will not reduce properly. If you do things with different programs for us, you'll need to reduce first.
After that, and for us in the same batch conversion step, we convert the pics to gifs, and drop the color depth down to a scant 8 colors. If it's a more complicated grayscale kind of page than Ranma typically is, you might need to make it 16 colors instead. Anything more than 16, and you're going to have some huge, fuzzy pages.
Now the magic of the gif conversion is what it does to the colors. Reducing to 8 colors forces the program to pick a near-match color for everything in the picture, instead of perfectly preserving the original scan colors (which is what makes the thing huge). And it does it based on YOUR gamma settings. So all those 20-levels of almost black become ONE color, real black. White is all one solid white, and the few levels of gray in the middle all get broken up into their proper precise colors, creating a sharpness and precision that wouldn't be possible any other way.
If you use I_View32 to do this, the way you do it is to load up I_View. Hit 'b' for batch, then select all your original jpg pages. Select gif as the output format, and the select 'advanced options' in the batch window. In advanced options, we set the shrink down size. For us it was 800 pixels across. So we'd only entire in the width, and leave the height blank, then turn on both 'resample' to make it smooth, and 'aspect ratio' to force the program to figure out how tall it should be to make it 800 pixels wide.
Then below that we select 'custom color depth', and enter in 8 colors. And since these are japanese comics and read backwards to the english way, I'd also include in the batch settings a horizontal flip (then manually go back to all the title pages and flip them back and resave them). Then start the whole beautiful batch going and get all sorts of steps down at once (for much of the project we did flip, reduce, resave, and convert as seperate steps, making things vastly more difficult, cause we didn't realize there was an easier way).

If you don't have I_View32, get it. It's the coolest viewer for windows ever. It's the perfect combination of capabilities and lightning speed. Without all the extra crap super complicated paint programs need to load up every time. Download it free at:
http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474/

WHEW! And after all that, you should hopefully end up with a very crisp, clean, sharp looking scan, with pure blacks, pure whites, and sharp lines. ^^
In the beginning it would take us a solid hour per chapter to scan. By the end we'd streamlined it down so much we could do one in 25-30 minutes.

If you have any more questions about it, don't hesitate to ask. :D

>Take care,
>Bryan

SHADE :)

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WHEW! God I talk a lot, don't I? But that's it! Well, that's not REALLY it, we could probably say a lot more, but hell we've been at this for hours now. And that's not even including all the time EvlNabiki & I spent writing up most of this stuff to begin with. I think this is plenty. ^^
*wavies*
Bye! ^_^

SHADE & EvlNabiki :)
gurf@erols.com

Part I of the Ranma FAQ ...... Home