Long time no post

Hey folks. Sorry for my total silence for five years. Bit of real life business distracted me from the task and then I basically never picked it up again. Shit of me I know. Sorry.

There is, however, light on the horizon, though it’s not shining from me. If you’re still getting RSS feed updates from this place then you’re probably interested in knowing about http://www.yugenykk.org/ where a fellow is editing Neil’s translations onto the MangaProject scans. Not quite the 1200dpi scans I failed to put out, but definitely worth the effort on their part.

And worth the excuse to re-read, of course.

 

Probably shouldn’t expect any more follow-ups on this blog, I imagine, but I’ll keep it around for posterity. Thanks for those who showed their support years ago, and apologies again for letting you all down.

A Call to Arms

I’m going to need some kind-hearted folk to help me clean and typeset this volume. I do plan on doing some of it myself, but I am slow and inexperienced at this point and could use the help.

My thoughts right now are to split the work up by chapters, and have people take my TIFs and generate a cleaned version at the same DPI and a typeset version at 300DPI and return then to me. I will then look at them myself and send them to some QCers for comment. I want to make this the best possible version of YKK short of an official release so I reserve the right to be picky.

In an ideal world I would hope to be able to scan a volume on a weekend and have edited chapters by the next weekend, but I don’t expect to reach that point. It would just be nice. Quality must reign supreme over speed, here.

If you’re interested in putting yourself forward, drop me a comment on this post and have a crack at this page. Oh, and if you’re only interested in one part of the job still say hi. I have no idea what kind of response I’ll get here so you may be vital.

Volume One Scanned, and Thoughts on the Future

I went out today and bought a $20 hair drier and a $0.90 sheet of 250gsm black paper, then spent roughly six or seven hours on scanning volume one.

Debinding took me a little bit of time to get right, and due to the way I did it (leaving the coloured pages for last) the highest-numbered pages are actually the one with the most ragged edges. I did get it figured out before halfway though so for the most part the debound pages are as smooth-edged as they can be, which is still somewhat rough given no one is meant to see them and they don’t get smoothed off at the printer.

I scanned two pages at a time, which leaves the next step as cropping and rotating each page out into its own TIFF file. I’m undecided at this point whether to then create downscaled PNGs for cleaning and typesetting, or whether to have the cleaning happen while still at 1200dpi and only downscale for the typesetting. The former is probably easier, but the latter means that the high res versions will look much nicer than the greyed-out raw scans do.

Any thoughts from others on that?

First Post

I have long lamented that the IMO superior translation of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as done by Neil from misago.org and the Gnomes from pander.us has relatively poor scans compared to the IMO inferior MangaProject version. It’s a crying shame but I intend to do something about it.

All pages will be scanned at 1200dpi and saved initially as TIFFs with LZH (lossless) compression. I’ll then downsample them into 300dpi 8-bit PNGs (JPGs for colour) for editing purposes unless convinced otherwise. If anyone ever wants a super-high-res copy of a page for use as a poster or something, feel free to ask and I will most likely oblige.

I encourage you to buy a genuine copy of the manga. It’s fairly cheap and it’s goddamn worth it. Plus you support Ashinano-sensei and that is a good thing in my book. I bought my copies from Honto.jp, which is a Japanese store that ships outside the country but doesn’t have an English option. Use whatever store is most convenient for you.