Implementation of a helper program for comics creation using text processing methods

Abstract

The paper discusses the development of a helper program "TypesetHelper", designed to facilitate the process of creating and translating comics. An analysis of functions of translation in modern society shows that translation, currently, is primarily a means of enabling communication between people who speak different languages. This applies, among other things, to such a specific niche as the translation of graphic novels, comics and manga. In the modern world, comics have become an integral part of popular culture, but in Ukraine, the culture of reading and translating comics is only at the stage of active formation. The purpose of this work is to create software that would facilitate the process of work with the inclusion of translated text in corresponding cleared illustrations. It is demonstrated that the existing software, including both general-purpose graphic editors like Adobe Photoshop and specialized programs for automatic recognition and translation of comics and manga, has disadvantages with respect to the problem being solved and can not be considered as a complete analogue of the software being developed. The functions that the program should perform include opening an image file, placing a text in a selected area, centering a text relative to a cloud, creating text layout, creating correct word division using automatic hyphenation methods, saving the image to a file. An analysis of possible methods of text layout when filling text clouds of various forms is given. The paper consider software design using the Unified Modeling Language (Use Case diagram, State Diagram, User Activity diagram) and its development using the C# programming language. Illustrations of the program operation process are given, which demonstrate its interface and examples of text division and layout using the selected methods. The developed helper program has practical value and can be used in comics and manga publishing houses, or for amateur translation. Keywords: text processing, comics, text layout, UML, C#.