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.
Typesetting issues
| Issue | Examples |
|---|---|
| Vertical ellipses | |
| Typos (commonly, incorrectly-doubled letters in words like “embarrassed”) | |
| Inconsistent line spacing | |
| Line spacing too small or too large | |
| Uncentered text | |
| Bad shaping | |
| Incorrect crossbar I | |
| Missing crossbar I (assuming that the font has it) | |
| Not using different fonts for different JA fonts (incl. thoughts) | |
| Next-line ellipses or exclamation mark | |
| Hyphen at the start of the line | |
| Wrong hyphenation points | |
| Four-dot ellipses | |
| Missing punctuation at end of sentence | |
| Non-comic font used or “chopsticks” font used (e.g. Manga Temple) | |
| Cliché font used (e.g. Comic Sans, Wild Words) | |
| Using different fonts for different characters | |
| Text not centre-aligned (this isn’t always bad; just follow the shape of the bubble) | |
| Stray space | |
| No space after ellipses or space before ellipses | |
| Capitalization at the start of bubbles, when it continues a sentence | |
| No capitalization at the start of bubbles, when it doesn’t continue a sentence | |
| Not enough white border around SFX | |
| Font aspect ratio is messed with | |
| Bad perspective transform | |
| Text too close to edge of bubble | |
| Text is off-black | |
| Bubbles too thin (should have redrawn bubble) | |
| Text rotated 90° | |
| Empty bubble | |
| Missing SFX | |
| Inconsist capitalization and punctuation of side text | |
| Obscured text missing a half-covered letter | |
| “Penrose stairs” layering | |
| Mismatched repetion | |
| Mismatched flashback text | |
| Abrupt cutoffs use dashes, not ellipses |
Translation issues
| Issue | Examples |
|---|---|
| Untranslated SFX: “Doki”, “Go”, etc | |
| Nonsensical SFX | |
| Bad/unnatural wording | |
| Incorrectly added hyphenated phrase | |
| Incorrectly not added hyphenated phrase (e.g. “first year” → “first-year”) | |
| Apostophes and “s”s: “Girl’s school”, “Parent’s evening” | |
| Missing comma: “It’s not like I’m mad at you Akizuki-san.” | |
| Extra comma: “I think, […]” | |
| Contraction not used in speech, e.g. “you are” | |
| Phrase that is close to, but not exactly, an English idiom | |
| Inconsistent spelling dialect | |
| Inconsistently-spaced words, e.g. “photoshoot” vs “photo shoot” | |
| Missing space in words that are sometimes compound: “She walked onstage”, “Good to have you onboard” | |
| Wrong extended letter (e.g. “grabbbbeeeeed” instead of “graaaaabbed”) | |
| En dashes should be used to hyphenate phrases that have spaces: “red bean paste–filled bun”, “Cold War–era” | |
| Capitalization of words that are both normal and proper nouns: “to Dad” but “to my dad”. | |
| Inconsistent tense | |
| Inconsistent 3rd person vs 2nd person | |
| Stock phrases: “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 like “Kya” or “Eehh” | |
| Overuse of Japanese punctuation like tildes or “…!” | |
| Overuse of ◯◯ or XX or similar, instead of rewording | |
| 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 | |
| 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 |