Miscellaneous Question for typesetters

[Lypiphera]

Is it alright to have dangling ellipses at the end of a line in a bubble (ellipses that have their OWN line)? Like in this page, where you have

Who
knows
...

and

That's
just
what you
imagine
...

I wanted to tell a fellow editor to avoid them because I personally think they're ugly as hell, but I dunno, it might just be a matter of style or something.

 

[[Ju-Ni]Vicissitude]

It really depends on what you want, if you're in charge. When I did Angel Heart for Evil_Genius, the ellipses were always horizontal at the end of the last word in the sentence (like this...). For Ju-Ni, they're vertical on several lines after the last line.

.
.
.

And then we adjust the line spacing.

 

[zidane]

Is it alright to have dangling ellipses at the end of a line in a bubble (ellipses that have their OWN line)? Like in this page, where you have

Who
knows
...

and

That's
just
what you
imagine
...

I wanted to tell a fellow editor to avoid them because I personally think they're ugly as hell, but I dunno, it might just be a matter of style or something.

I agree, from an aesthetics point of view, it looks *kinda* ugly, definetely not the ideal bubble, but it's often just necessary unless you are one of those who don't care how many hyphens they have to use.

It basically comes down to choosing the lesser evil, and the ... on an own line is imo definetely the better choice than having an ugly shape.

What I do to make it somewhat better is change the leading, or in other words the distance between the ... and the line above it. Without that, with most fonts it kinda looks like there were some random 3 dots within the bubble that don't even belong to the text. >_>

Try and type the 3 dots above a line of text, they'll be much closer to the text beneath them, a bit more than that distance is my usual ideal for such cases.

However, usually you can avoid such problems if you decrease the fontsize a little bit, or change the width of the text or at least single lines (if you go with ~94% for some words, nobody will really notice). A lot more text shapes are gonna be possible with that and you can try and see if the ... fit into the line above that way.

And please don't put them vertically, we typeset an english text, not a japanese one. We form our sentences by writing from left to right, top to bottom, we do not form them by writing single letters or words from top to bottom, right to left, as such putting them vertically is an absurdity for the regular, english reader who could care less how the raw looks like, he only see's the end product after all.

 

[Lypiphera]

It really depends on what you want, if you're in charge. When I did Angel Heart for Evil_Genius, the ellipses were always horizontal at the end of the last word in the sentence (like this...). For Ju-Ni, they're vertical on several lines after the last line.

.
.
.

And then we adjust the line spacing.

Oh god, that's even worse! I agree with Zidane, it's a big pet peeve of mine to see Japanese punctuation carried over in the translation. Like those vertical ellipses. And vertical dashes. Ack.

Zidane: I guess it's just my personal preference, but I try to avoid hyphens as much as possible as well. I hate it when typesetters hyphenate every other word just so they get that perfect diamond shape. Reading a bubble with like four cut off words is super annoying.

And I respectfully disagree: the lesser evil for me would actually be to have an "uglier" bubble shape than to have "..." all by itself. I think this (where the ellipses are appended to the last word) looks a lot better than the first page I linked to, and I don't think the shape's ugly at all.

 

[Name-Undecided]

If it's the end of the sentence, I'd put question marks instead of ellipses. They're overused in some series and can often be translated away. If it's connected to a sentence in the next bubble, I'd do my best not to have it hanging on its own lines, but some bubbles just won't cooperate. I get a lot of tiny skinny bubbles I can't even fit a word into, much less a word plus ellipses. In such cases, I won't stress out over it, it's just manga. Hang away!

(Vertical after the last line though, that's just eww...)