Hello Everybody,

During my time translating D.Gray-Man, I have received messages from typesetters, saying that my translations where too hard to correctly fit into their RAWs.
Thus, I have continuously developed a system to make the texts both fast to write and fast to typeset. While I have already been using many aspects of it in my recent translations, the rules of the system where only mentioned when I first used them, making it time-consuming for new scanlation groups to get them all.

This is a compilation of everything there is to the system as of DGM 105.

1. Description of Speech Bubbles

When a character says something over more than one consecutive bubble, the syntax is as follows:

Allen:
1: I'll kill you
2: when Duke Nukem Forever comes out

Jasdebi:
1: That's vaporware!
2: And it sucks!

So, what Allen said, was written in 2 separate speech bubbles. The speech bubbles get consecutive numbers in the order of appearance (Top to bottom, right to left), until somebody else says something or until the end of the page.

When a character says something in only one speech bubble (even if it is divided) it's written like this:

Allen: I'm wearing women's underwear
Line breaks are used to separate text in one bubble.

When I'm done checking everything, I might decide to print the speakers name in bold to improve readability, like this:
Allen:
1: I'll kill you
2: when Duke Nukem Forever comes out


2. Out-of-Bubble Text

In DGM, you sometimes come across text that is written by hand and outside (or in a corner) of the speech bubbles, usually funny remarks by the mangaka.

In that case, and in that case only, the position of the text is described between the preceding and the succeeding balloon. Like this:

Jasdebi:
[...]
5: But why?
Until just now, it looked like he's about to kick the bucket...
6: Where did he get this strength!!
Behind its head: Ehhhh
7: Let's see...
Can vampires convert their anger to strength?

This piece of text is meant:

3. New Pages

New Pages are started like this:
Page 1
Or if the file names in the RAW used do not correspond to the page numbers, like this:
Page 1 (578)
Assuming page one is saved i.e. as 578.jpg

After the cleanup, Pages are separated like this:

Lavi: Blah Blah

_________________________________________________
Page 2
_________________________________________________
Allen: Blub blah

Having 2 line breaks before and 1 after the page number.
Unfortunately vBulletin doesn't support Horizontal Rules, so I'll have to use this surrogate...

4. Tags

The following tags are used, which are not to be included as spoken text in the scanlation:

<Blah Blah> These are my comments. Posting them in the discussion page is for plebs.

<EOP X> (where X is a number) - End of Panel X
If a panel contains a lot of balloons by different speakers or if the bubbles are hard to match with the text for some other reason, I may choose to help the typesetter(s) by inserting this tag, marking the end of a particularly hard panel.

(aeml) - Add Exclamation Marks to Liking
I put this one in if (as it frequently happens in battles) a character speaks in a way that any number of exclamation marks is justified to describe the tone the corresponding sentence is spoken in.

To be continued...

RTT

/edit (11/18/2007): To reduce scrolling, I chose to remove the spaces between Bubbles from the same speaker.