Quality Control

Quality control, often abbreviated to QC, is the process of reading through a fully-typeset manga (ideally, alongside the raws) to point out mistakes and areas of improvement. It is also known as proofreading (PR), but this term may also refer to reading over the script prior to cleaning and typesetting.

Quality control should a collaborative process between the typesetter and QCer; there are often many rounds of back-and-forth before the best approach is decided upon.

This page collects a number of common issues that QCers will raise, and where appropriate gives examples. Not all of these represent mistakes; sometimes, the author will have done something odd, or it’s an intentional stylistic choice.

Typesetting issues

Issue	Examples
Vertical ellipsis
Typos (commonly, incorrectly-doubled letters in words like “embarrassed”)
Inconsistent line spacing
Line spacing too small or too large	Too small: Too large:
Text not centre-aligned (this isn’t always bad; just follow the shape of the bubble)
Text not centred
Bad shaping (though one often must sacrifice either shaping or readability if hyphenation is necessary, so this can be a tradeoff)	Should probably move “Yeah,” to the line above Should move “up.” to the previous line to avoid a triangular text shape Should move “I” to the previous line to make a nicer text shape
Incorrect crossbar I ­– crossbar I should only be used when the letter stands alone, which includes the personal pronoun (“I”, “I’m”, “I’ll”) and (depending on stylistic choice) acronyms.	Should have followed Automatic Crossbar I’s advice.
Missing crossbar I (assuming that the font has it)
Not using different fonts for different JA fonts (incl. thoughts); this isn’t always bad, and one should exercise judgement to make a result that’s not too plain and not too cluttered
Next-line punctuation, e.g. ellipsis, exclamation mark or question mark (can be a lesser of two evils)
Hyphen at the start of the line
Wrong hyphenation points	“Person” is hyphenated as “per•son”
Two-dot, four-dot, etc ellipsis; ellipses should be in multiples of three
Missing punctuation at end of sentence
Non-comic font used, “chopsticks” font used (e.g. Manga Temple) or Comic Sans used
Using different fonts for different characters
Stray space	A stray space before “reminiscing” Double space after “mind.”
Wrong spacing around punctuation, often ellipses
Capitalization at the start of bubbles, when it continues a sentence
No capitalization at the start of a sentence
Not enough white border around SFX
Font aspect ratio is messed with
Clashing ascenders and descenders, and other spacing oddities from the font	Here, the “j” on the first line clashes with the “h” on the second line, and the “y” on the fifth line clashes with the “l” below it. This can be resolved by switching fonts, increasing line spacing, or adjusting letter spacing manually. Additionally, even though the text is correct, the font makes the space after the dash look larger than other spaces, which should be fixed similarly.
Font glyph needs replacement – sometimes, a font will have a particularly bad glyph and it’s desirable to replace that glyph in particular. Of course, this must be done consistently; one may wish to edit the font itself using a tool like FontForge to that effect.	The “z” in this font is very large and may warrant replacing. The apostrophe in this font is weirdly low and may warrant replacing.
Bad perspective transform
Text too close to edge of bubble
Text is off-black (or off-white)
Bubbles too thin (should have redrawn bubble)
Text rotated 90°
Empty bubble (sometimes intentional on the author’s part, but should not be introduced in a translation)
Missing SFX
Inconsistent capitalization and punctuation of side text
Obscured text missing a half-covered letter
“Penrose stairs” layering: when text is above one part of the art but below another in an inconsistent way
Mismatched repetition
Mismatched flashback text
Abrupt cutoff that uses an ellipsis (instead of a dash)
Text split over multiple bubbles (this can be a lesser of two evils, especially when one is unwilling to redraw the bubble entirely)
Inconsistent use of directional vs non-directional apostrophe
Aliased or blurry text
Overuse of cliché fonts like Wild Words; the font itself isn’t bad, but one can do much better
Sound effects in speech – these can be written in plain text, but may also use breath marks, italic or bold-italic	An example of breath marks, a.k.a. cat whiskers, fireflies or crow’s feet: Use on words like “Whew”, “Sigh”, “Grunt”, “Cough”, etc

Translation issues

Grammatical mistakes should be pointed out, but can be introduced for spoken emphasis.

Issue	Examples
Untranslated SFX: “Doki”, “Go”, etc	“Doki doki” can be translated as “th-thump”, “ba-dump”, “bdmp”, etc
Nonsensical SFX	The SFX is a speech bubble from the chair, so it should be a noise the chair makes, like “creak”. Did she really extend her hand and crack it?
Bad/unnatural wording
Incorrectly added hyphenated phrase	“The most-popular flavour is”
Incorrectly not added hyphenated phrase	“first year” should be “first-year”
Apostophes and “s”s	“Girl’s school” should be “Girls’ school”, “Parent’s evening” should be “Parents’ evening”
Missing comma	“It’s not like I’m mad at you Akizuki-san.”, “Oh no not with that girl…”
Extra comma	“I think, it’s a good idea”
Contraction not used in speech (often subjective)	“You are” → “you’re”, “I am” → “I’m”
Phrase that is close to, but not exactly, an English idiom	“You’ve been following me all the afternoon!” → “You’ve been following me all afternoon!” “I guess it can’t be this bad to” → “I guess it can’t be that bad to” “I bought it on my own accord” → “I bought it of my own accord” “What’s gotten in her?” → “What’s gotten into her?” “Did I just get caught up into this?” → “Did I just get caught up in this?” “I had a few tricks up my sleeves” → “I had a few tricks up my sleeve” “Her reputation spread wide and far” → “Her reputation spread far and wide” “What’s up all of the sudden?” → “What’s up all of a sudden?”
Inconsistent spelling dialect	“ize” versus “ise” endings; “Mum” versus “Mom”; “color” versus “colour”; etc
Inconsistently-spaced compound phrases (in the case where both are grammatically correct)	“photoshoot” versus “photo shoot”
Missing space in words that are sometimes compound	“Good to have you onboard”
Wrong extended letter; in general, one should elongate the vowel that is stressed in English	“grabbbbeeeeed” → “graaaaabbed”, “pleaaaase” → “pleeeease”, “Stop ittttt!” → “Stop iiiiiit!”
Letter extend to two letters long – always use at least three	“graabbed”, “pleease”, “Stop iit!”
En dashes should be used to hyphenate phrases that have spaces	Correct examples include “red bean paste–filled bun”, “Cold War–era”
Capitalization of words that are both normal and proper nouns:	“to my Dad” → “to my dad”, “to dad” → “to Dad”
Inconsistent tense
Inconsistent 3rd person vs 2nd person
Stock phrases (to be used in moderation)	“that person”, “pinch”, “even if you tell me that”, “say unnecessary things”, “killing intent”; see also this spreadsheet of stock phrases
Overuse of Japanese sounds	“Kya”, “Eehh”
Overuse of Japanese punctuation like tildes and ellipses-exclamation marks	“Oh no~”, “No way…!”
Overuse of ◯◯ or XX or similar, instead of rewording	“You wanted to go to ◯◯ High School, didn’t you?” → “You wanted to go to that high school, didn’t you?”
Inline TL notes; prefer folding them into the text, or adding notes at the end
Questions (including rhetorical) without question marks

Redrawing issues

Issue	Examples
Lines connected incorrectly
Screentone wrong shade
Screentone misaligned
Screentone too blurry or sharp
Redrawing using wrong colour	The circled region is pure black, while the region around is slightly brown. Using a filter mask to increase contrast can help spot this kind of issue. An instance where cleaning was performed with a bluish-black colour instead of real black.
Missed cleaning speck
Lines connected that were intentionally split in the raw
Missing redraw
Lines too blurry or sharp
No levelling: Black is off-black, white is off-white