Hey! If you’re technically inclined, you might want to also check out minicomic, a tool that MenTaLguY and myself wrote to handle this very process!

This version of the Tutorial was created using the following software:

• Windows 2000 SP4
• The GIMP 2.2.8
• Inkscape 0.42

(I’ve since switched to doing my books using Inkscape and Scribus on Kubuntu Linux. I’ll write something up about that sometime in the future.)

This tutorial is here to show you how you can start to “go digital” with your minicomic production using Free Open Source Software. I won’t go into all the virtues of FOSS here, but for what you’re getting, you can’t beat the price.

This tutorial assumes you have a good amount of computer experience. You’ve downloaded software from the Internet and installed it, you might have worked with other graphic design tools (Photoshop, Fireworks (now dead), Illustrator, Freehand (quite nice, now dead), QuarkXPress (I wish it was dead)), and you have a scanner hooked up to your computer and it’s all configured to scan using a TWAIN driver. You most likely had a TWAIN driver installed when you installed your scanner—the vast majority of Windows-compatible scanners install one. You might also have a good laser printer hooked up to your computer or on your network, and your computer is configured to print to it. It’s not required, but it’s highly recommended.

The Inkscape part of this tutorial also assumes you’re making digest-sized minicomics—8.5×11” paper folded in half and stapled down the middle with a long-reach or saddle stapler.

The first step is to download and install the software you’ll be using. The two pieces of software you need are The GIMP and Inkscape.

The GIMP is a bitmap image editing application, much like Photoshop, Fireworks, or Paint Shop Pro. It’s a radically different program from any of those, though, so don’t expect to learn it all in one night. There’s a bunch of tutorials for The GIMP this tutorial is only sticking with what you need to know to paste-up a minicomic on the computer, so don’t ask about anything beyond that.

There’s one cool thing you can do to The GIMP to make it easier to transition from Photoshop, and that’s install a set of keyboard shortcuts that make The GIMP work (keyboard-wise almost) like Photoshop. Grab them from here.

www.inkscape.org” style=”float: left” /> Inkscape is a vector image editing program similar to Illustrator and Freehand that works natively in the SVG format. SVG is a very cool XML-based vector file format, which is a lot more flexible than EPS or Illustrator format. As for the program itself, Inkscape, like The GIMP, does things a bit differently than any of the previously mentioned packages, but if you’re used to either Illustrator or Freehand, you’ll find that Inkscape can do many basic things a LOT faster than either of those “professional” packages can possibly do.

Install The GIMP first, then install Inkscape, then (if you choose) install the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts for GIMP. Then you’ll be ready to rock and roll on your FOSS Digital Minicomic Adventure!

Fire up The GIMP. It’s probably under your Start menu or on your Desktop. If this is your first time running the program, it’ll ask you to set a bunch of options. Most of the settings you can leave at the defaults, but the really important one that you need to set is Tile Cache Size. This affects how well The GIMP works with large images…like the 300 DPI scanned minicomic pages you’re about to work with. An easy way to figure out the optimal Tile Cache Size: Take the amount of RAM in your computer and divide by 3. I have 768MB of RAM, so my Tile Cache Size is 256MB. This way, The GIMP is responsive with large images, and you can still run other apps while you’re working. If you need to set the Tile Cache Size after you install, from the main GIMP window (the one with the set of tools, just like the Photoshop Tools palette but much bigger), select File -> Preferences. In the Preferences window, select Environment. On the right-hand side, you can set the Tile Cache Size:

Now, let’s get started on your minicomic! In the main GIMP window, from the File menu, select Acquire -> TWAIN…

In the current version of The GIMP for Windows, there’s an annoying bug/feature where The GIMP will ask you what your TWAIN Source is every single time you select File -> Acquire -> TWAIN…

Most people only have one scanner installed, so there’s only one option in the list. Your scanner’s TWAIN driver probably is different from mine, unless you’re using a modern EPSON scanner:

The important things to note when you’re scanning in your artwork are:

• The Image Type: There are typical selections for Color Photo, Line Art, whatever. You want a Black and White Photo. You can try Line Art, but it’s just going to take you longer, and you won’t like the results. Plus, a bunch of the stuff I talk about in this tutorial suddenly becomes pointless if you use a Line Art setting.
• The Resolution: 300 DPI, unless your printer can resolve at higher resolutions, in which case the sky’s the limit. My HP LaserJet 4M Plus really can’t (not bitmap images, anyway), so that’s what I use. Trust me, no one’s going to notice the difference.
• There might be other settings (you see mine has Unsharp Mask checked). Experiment and see what results you get.

Highlight the area of the image that you want to scan in. The pages I’m scanning here (from my 24 hour comic Fashionable Espionage) are 11×17” pages, with a 7×11” comic page in the middle. I always work at 7×11”, since it fits quite nicely on a 9×12” sheet of drawing paper, which is the size of paper on which I draw A Moment of Clarity, and it scales down nicely to digest format size. Regardless of your page size, you’re probably going to get a bit of a dark patch on the edge of the page, most likely on the right. Don’t scan that bit in (obviously). Scan the page into The GIMP and you’ll see the scanned bit open in a new window on your desktop. If it’s covering the main GIMP window, scoot it out of the way so you can still get to the main GIMP File menu.

Now, physically rotate the page in your scanner 180 degrees and scan the other half of the page. You’ll end up with two new windows on your desktop: one window bring the top of the page, the other the bottom of the page:

GIMP Shortcut Keys Time!: To zoom in and out of an image, use = and -. If you downloaded ps-menurc and installed it, from the Main GIMP window, go into File -> Preferences -> Interface -> Configure Keyboard Shortcuts and set Zoom In and Zoom Out to = and -, respectively. Once you’re used to it, it’s a heck of a lot nicer than PS’s [Ctrl] = and [Ctrl] -.

Now, you’ve noticed that your images probably need to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise and counter-clockwise. Before you hunt through the menus for Image -> Transform -> Rotate, hit the 7 key or the 9 key, respectively. 7 rotates counter-clockwise, and 9 rotates clockwise (and 8 rotates the image 180 degrees).

You now have two rotated image halves. The next step is to enlarge the canvas area of the larger of the two images so that you can paste the bottom half onto the top half. From the menu of the top image, select Image -> Canvas Size…

My minicomic pages, as I said before, are 7×11”. What you want to do is set the Height of the image to be slightly larger than the height of your minicomic page. I like to set mine to 11.5”. This gives me enough room to paste in the other half of the page and have enough wiggle room to adjust things. First, though, click the little chain link icon to the right of the Width/Height fields. That disables proportional scaling of the fields so that you can change the height without modifying the width. Make sure the units are set to Inches (or whatever your local unit of measurement may be).

If you’re coming from Photoshop, you’re probably used to “gluing” the image to one of the edges or corners of the window. In The GIMP, you can move the existing canvas to an arbitrary area on the page, or you can attempt to throw it into one of the corners, or you can click the Center button to center the old image within the newly-sized larger canvas. In this case, you want to throw the image to the top of the canvas area (the bit in the lower middle of the Set Image Canvas Size window). Finally, click Resize, and you’ll get this (which will probably confuse you if you’re used to the default Photoshop behavior):

What you’re seeing is that The GIMP, unlike Photoshop, automatically assigns an alpha channel to a scanned image, which means that when you re-Canvas Size the image to a larger size, the “background” part of the layer will not be expanded and be filled with the current background color. The easy solution is to make sure the background color is white (Tools -> Default Colors will make sure of that), and then, from the Layer menu, select Layer to Image Size and you’ll get the results you’re probably expecting:

Now, you need to move the smaller bottom part of the page onto the top part of the page. This bit’s really easy if you follow along. Arrange the following three windows so that you can see the majority of each one:

• The window with the top half of the comic page
• The window with the bottom half of the comic page
• The Layers window (hit F7 or select Dialogs -> Layers to make it reappear if it’s missing)

Now, click on the Bottom Half window, then click on the Layers window. Your Layers window should change so that you see a preview of the Bottom Half, and the name of the Bottom Half window appears in the dropdown at the top of the Layers window:

Now, click and drag the layer preview icon from the Layers window and drop it on the Top Half window:

Once you’ve dropped it, the Bottom Half image will appear, as a new layer, on top of the Top Half image:

The next step is to move the new layer into the right position so that, when you merge the two layers down, you have a seamless join. Select the Move tool from the main GIMP window:

After you select the Move tool, make sure you select the option Move the Current Layer so that the tool behaves like it does in Photoshop.

(One cool, yet sometimes annoying, feature of the GIMP’s Move tool is that by default, when you click and drag on the image, the top-most visible layer under the cursor at the time of the click is the one that’s moved.)

Move the top-most layer so that it’s pretty close to where it should be. Then, zoom in nice and close, and use the middle mouse button or the image sliders to pan the view so that you’re looking at the edge where the two images should meet. Fine-tune your alignment with the mouse and the arrow keys on the keyboard so that the two layers are seamless:

Now, go to Layer -> Merge Down to merge the top layer onto the bottom layer.

All right! You’ve gotten your page all set up and ready to go…almost. You still have a page that’s a bit larger than the actual area of your comic page. Mine right now is 7.363×11.5” big, and I want it to be 7×11”. For this, you must use the Crop tool.

Select the Crop tool from the main GIMP window:

Start dragging a crop rectangle around your image. If you’ve never done this before, it’s easy: Click on the image at one corner of what you want to keep, and drag a rectangle to the opposite corner. The second you start doing this, a dialog window will pop up:

What you want to do is adjust the second set of measurements—the Width and Height. Change the units to inches (or, if you’re one of those Metric system folks, cm) and then set the Width and the Height to the size of your comic page:

Now, you have to drag one of the crop handles in order to be able to move the crop area. If you’re a Photoshop user, don’t automatically click inside of the crop area! You will be an unhappy user who should immediately undo ( [Ctrl] z ) what you just did, so that you can try again.

Grab one of these handles to move the crop area to where you want it to be:

and then click the Crop button or click inside of the Crop area and your image will be cropped!

There’s a little bit of clean up that you can do to make your image look even nicer. This final step before saving is to adjust the color levels of your page, so that you can blow out all of the grays and be left with nice, crisp blacks and whites.

From the image’s menu, select Layer -> Colors -> Adjust Levels…

If you’ve used Levels in Photoshop, this all looks familiar. If you haven’t, here’s the bare minimum you need for minicomic production.

See that big curve all the way on the right hand side, and the slightly smaller bump on the left hand side?

Move the white arrow that’s right under the curve to the start of where the curve just begins to appear, then do the same to the black arrow on the left hand side:

You can also move the middle triangle. Experiment. Once you’re done, click OK and see what an improvement that small adjustment made to your page. Nice and clean!

(Note that this image is not entirely “clean”—in order for the Web version of this page to load in a decent amount of time, the JPEG compression factor needed to be set pretty low. Yours will be much much cleaner.)

Now, there is a very good possibility that you will scan your page in and it will look crooked:

Crooked, crooked, crooked. It’s best to scan these things in straight. But if you can’t, you need to learn how to accurately rotate the image in The GIMP so that it’s straight.

Select the Measure tool:

Start at the upper left of your comic page. I draw crop marks on my comic page with a template and then connect them with a ruler for this step. Click and drag the measurement tool to the upper right of your page, like this:

From this, you’re going to get an angle at the bottom of the window (and maybe from another window popping up called the Info Window):

From the Image’s menu, go to Layer -> Transform -> Arbitrary Rotation… Enter in the angle that you got from the measurement into the Angle box, then click Rotate:

And your image is rotated the right way!

Finally, you’re ready to save your page. From the image’s File menu, select Save as…

In the Save dialog, type in your filename, and also include the file extension .png. One really cool feature of The GIMP is that you can select the filetype of the saved image simply by typing in the right extension. If you need to navigate to a different folder, click Browse for Other Folders and you’ll get a file selector:

PNG, like SVG, is another one of those cool image formats. It’s a compressed, lossless, full-color RGB format with a full 8 bit alpha channel. It’s like a souped-up GIF file, GIF being the format that PNG was targeted to replace…but couldn’t because of Internet Explorer’s lack of good support for PNG. It also just happens to be the best format for bringing your minicomic pages into Inkscape for paste-up. Click Save, and a warning probably will pop up:

Saving as PNG requires you to merge all of your layers down temporarily. Even if you only have one layer in your image, it might still ask. Just hit Export and the Save as PNG dialog comes up:

You can leave all of these options at the defaults and hit OK. Your image will be saved, and you can move on to the rest of the pages in your book! Scan away!

Once you’ve scanned all your pages, it’s Inkscape time! You can go ahead and close The GIMP and then start up Inkscape. You’ll get the default Inkscape window, which looks totally different from The GIMP:

What we’re going to do now is set up Inkscape to handle our digest-sized comic. We’re going to lay down some guides and a grid to help us place the PNG files onto each page spread.

Start by opening the Document Preferences:

You’ll get a multi-tabbed window for setting all sorts of fun settings:

Here’s what you need to set (if you’re doing digest-sized minicomics, of course);

• Page Tab: * Default units: in * Canvas size: US Letter * Canvas orientation: Landscape
• Grid Tab: * Show grid: Checked * Grid units: in * Spacing X & Spacing Y: 0.25

You can just close the window once everything has been set. One really nice thing about Inkscape is that any changes you make in almost any dialog are set immediately. No Apply or OK buttons needed for the most part.

Your page should now look like this:

Next is to add some guides that will help you figure out just how big you can scale your pages. If you’re working at digest size, you’re going to want a quarter inch of margin around each interior page. You’re going to have to drag guidelines from the rulers that are on the top- and left-hand sides of the drawing area, and you’re going to want those guides at some exact locations. Reminder: these directions are for US Letter pages. Modify accordingly for other sizes.

Click and drag on the left-hand side ruler and drag it out onto the page, to around the 1/4” mark. Don’t worry if you don’t get it exact, because once you’ve finished your drag, you’re going to let go of the mouse button and, with the pointer still over the guide, double-click on the guide. The guideline dialog box will appear, letting you exactly position the guide on the page:

Enter in 0.25 into the text box and hit the OK button and your guide will move to the .25” mark. Now, make three more vertical guideline at the following positions:

• 5.25”
• 5.75”
• 10.75”

To make a horizontal guideline, you drag from the ruler at the top of the page down into the page. Make horizontal guidelines at the following positions:

• 0.25”
• 8.25”

Your page should now look like this:

Now, go ahead and save this file somewhere handy—File -> Save as… Call it Digest Minicomic.svg and hit Save. From now in in the tutorial, when I say to “open the digest template”, you’re going to open this file, so remember where you put it!

Inkscape Template Time! You can save this file to any old place on your hard drive, but the best place is in the Inkscape templates folder. That way, when you want to make a new minicomic page spread, you simply go to File -> New -> Digest Minicomic.

If you didn’t change the install path during install, Inkscape is current installed in C:\Program Files\Inkscape on your computer. Inside of the Inkscape folder is a folder called share, and in there is a folder called templates. If you feel comfortable navigating through your filesystem to this extent, then when you go to save your Digest Minicomic template, go into the

C:\Program Files\Inkscape\share\templates\

folder and save your file as Digest Minicomic.svg. Now close Inkscape and reopen it. For you brave folks, when I say “open the digest template”, you’re going to go File -> New -> Digest Minicomic and the template will appear as a new untitled document.

Now would be a good time to talk about your printer’s capabilities. I have an old-school HP LaserJet 4 M Plus, a very durable and very well-supported printer. If you’re going to be printing out your own minicomics en masse instead of taking them to a copy shop to be duplicated, you’re going to want a laser printer. A guide on selecting a good laser printer and comparing the costs of copy shop vs. print-it-yourself will come at a later date (Sneak Preview: HP LaserJet 4 and 5 printers are solid, are easy to get parts and toner for, and are über-cheap when you find them for sale on the Internet).

The reason we need to talk printers is because you need to figure out the printable area of your printer. Lots of inkjets can’t print on the bottom 1/2” of a page, which will be a problem if you’re trying to print out a full spread. It’s still possible to print out the spread, but it will involve a bit more work and planning, and it’s a process that I will add to the guide if readers are interested.

To be perfectly honest, if your printer can’t handle printing a full spread, it’s a lot less hassle to have a friend with a laser printer or a good digital copy shop take your files (once outputted to the right format) and print out the initial spreads for you. It’ll cost extra, though. If you’re like me and you put out a good number of minicomics in a year, you’re really just better off buying a decent laser printer and doing the whole darn thing yourself. Again, more on that in a future guide.

Let’s lay out our spread. Open the Digest template. Next, from the File menu, select Import…

Select your file and choose Open.

You’ll need to resize the comic page to fit within the guidelines that you set up. The fastest way to do this is to zoom out (the – and = keys work here just like in The GIMP) and change the size of the comic page using the Height and Width controls in the toolbar:

The area within the guides that you set up is 5.25×8”, but your page (if it’s 7×11”), when resized, will be slightly thinner than 5.25”—5.08” is the exact measurement. Click the lock to turn on proportional editing (like the chain icon in The GIMP). Change the measurement unit to inches and set the Height to 8. The image will resize in both directions and, if you’ve zoomed out far enough, you should be able to see your comic page. You may have to scroll around with the scroll bars or the middle mouse button to find the page:

Click and drag the comic page up to the left hand side of the page. Then zoom in and see if the page will fit within the guides in a nice way. If you want the position to be exact, set the X and Y in the toolbar to 0.25 and 0.25:

You’ve now placed your left hand spread! Be sure to check and, if necessary, move the page around so that everything that you want to keep appears within the guides. You can click on the page and use the cursor keys to fine-tune the placement of your page. You can also grab one of the corner arrow handles around the image and, holding the [Shift] key down, move the mouse to scale the page smaller or larger.

Now, do the same with the right hand spread (the X-Y corner measurements for the right hand side are 5.75 and 0.25), and you should have something that looks like this:

Save your page as an SVG file by going to File -> Save as… and then save the file, preferably in the same folder as your PNG source pages:

And you’re done! Now, set up the spreads for the rest of your pages. I use a naming convention like this to keep all of my spreads well-organized:

• Issue 08 Sheet 01 Side 01.svg
• Issue 08 Sheet 01 Side 02.svg
• Issue 08 Sheet 02 Side 01.svg
• …
• Issue 08 Cover.svg

If you’ve got a properly configured laser printer, this is when you’ll print your pages out. Select File -> Print…

Set up your printer to print as many pages as you’d like, then go to town! Properly configuring your printer will take experimentation, and once I write the laser printer guide, I want to collect as many minicomic printer setups as possible, so if you’re using a laser printer other than an HP LaserJet 4M Plus, let me know about your setup and I’ll put it in the future guide.

One thing to watch for—if you run a print job, and the bottom part of your page is getting cut off, you’re going to have to restart Inkscape. I make it a habit never to print more than two jobs from Inkscape before I restart the program.

Another thing to watch out for—since you were smart and got a laser printer with a manual feed tray (it’s in the front of my LaserJet 4M Plus), when you’re printing the backs of your pages, be sure not to rotate the paper 180 degrees. When the paper comes out, don’t rotate—just flip (if necessary).

One more printer rant for this guide—FAN YOUR PAPER! It helps reduce paper jams, which saves you money on paper and toner, and saves you time, as well. Do it every time (Every Time) you do a big print job:

• Hold the paper from one edge and fan the other edge.
• Rotate 90 degrees.
• Repeat until you get back around to your starting edge.
• Flip the paper over.
• Flip and rotate another 360 degrees.
• Put the paper in the printer.

If you don’t personally own a properly configured laser, and you don’t feel like buying one right now, it would be cheaper and less hassle for you to take the finished spreads to a good friend with a laser printer or to your local digital-ready copy shop and have them print out the spreads for you, either as master pages to be used in a photocopier, or as a full run of all of the copies of your book.

From the File menu, choose Export Bitmap…

Click Page, set the dpi to 300, choose a good Filename, and click Export. Your page will be saved as a full-size PNG file.

And this concludes the Digital Minicomic Paste-up Tutorial! If you have any questions or comments, be sure to let me know at coswellproductions.org.

Revisions:

Version 1.0 (10/9/2005): Initial Release

Version 1.1 (9/11/2006): Converted to Textile for Hobix

Version 1.2 (11/03/2007): Converted (quickly) to WordPress

This tutorial, including all graphics, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 4:48 am and is filed under Cartoons & Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.