There isn't exactly a quick way to do it. Copying and pasting from Photoshop to Illustrator (and depending on how much copy you have and how well your system switches between programs, it will vary). Your word balloons are coloured, so you might get away with keeping the word balloons in place and then putting the copy in them in Illustrator or inDesign. That might be a quicker way to "fix" any issue.

I don't know if I can help clarify this or not, but I'll try...

It basically boils down to this: Photoshop is bitmap art, while Illustrator and inDesign are vector art.
• Most of the artwork that we're talking about is bitmap art and at some point people are running it through Photoshop and creating a final image which will be bitmap art.
• Type is vector art - or at least it should be* - and will print best when it's provided to a printer as vector art. This has a lot to do with various Postscript nonsense and RIPs and whatever goes on in the mysterious world of printing (for more information about printing, we can do that in another form).

[*Photoshop doesn't treat type this way unless you're placing "smart objects" which you have to be creating in Illustrator or inDesign anyway. So you're duplicating the work. I'll use smart objects when I've got type interacting with the images in some way. I create the text when I'm lettering, and copy it into Photoshop and edit as necessary, save it, and bring it back into inDesign (which is what I'm doing all my lettering in)]

So basically, all art is going to be created in Photoshop and should be placed in Illustrator or inDesign where the type is set. This then gets exported as a PDF for print. Both Illustrator and inDesign have greater controls for creating PDFs (@Chris has mentioned this) and they won't rasterize the type. In fact, you can even embed the fonts in the PDF if necessary.

So now you need to make JPEGs... You can do this a number of ways and this goes back to your original question. You can make a JPEG directly from Illustrator or inDesign - either by saving/exporting as a JPEG or "saving for web". You can open your PDF in Acrobat and make a JPEG from there. Or you can open you PDF in Photoshop and save a JPEG from there (either by saving as a JPEG or "saving to web"). Which is best? I have no idea and I doubt that most people would notice. You'd have to try each and see what gives you the best results. I've saved JPEGs each of these ways depending on the job I was working on and what the client needed as far as file size. Each works.

In the end, it's really up to you to balance the quality of the final JPEG and the file size for downloading. Hope this helps!

Jason, one other point that might work in your favour here is that you have a custom typeface that you created that almost looks as if you lettered by hand for both the type and the work balloons. So you might be able to get away with keeping your lettering in Photoshop. Print some stuff out and see how it looks. If it's fuzzy, you might need to change it. I've put type in my images many times and as long it's a high enough resolution (ie. over 300 dpi, which I'm sure you are) then it should print ok.

For my own GN, since I'm just starting it, I'm setting all the type in inDesign and even drawing the word balloons in inDesign. But that goes back to another discussion in the printing section of "workflow for comics" and what people do or should be doing.

@ecna---well i don't know the technical reasons...i just know that Indesign was specifically created to manage and handle typography for print applications. Photoshop was designed to create raster based art and it happens to have a type tool in it for convenience. I'm a big believer in using the correct tool for the job, and photoshop has become the most misused tool in the box, because of its full feature set.

I don't know the details of how its engineered....but i do know that a Ferrari is effing fast.

@jason and everyone worried about it....the best bet is to print out a page or two and see how it looks. Even if you go to Kinkos and print out at 100% scale you should be able to tell whether or not your type is sharp. I think it would be faster and better quality to re-letter in illustrator/indesign than copy and paste import whatever from PS.

One of my type teachers at school had a special magnifying loop with built in light to inspect printed type on a page. You dont' have to be that discerning.

I guess I should clarify what I meant there by copy and paste... I meant copy and paste the actual "copy" from the word balloons instead of retyping it all. I would agree with Chris and don't just paste in the raster art! That didn't even cross my mind... Not sure how THAT would even print!

@jnsmith--sometimes the copy and past works ok, but sometimes it gets messy. I've had problems trying to copy large bodies of text from PS and Illustrator into IND. It does some weird grouping thing to the type that you can't undo, and makes it un-editable. Other times its ok. Its worth a try though.

I'd recomend setting up paragraph and character style sheets for all your lettering. Making changes can be done later on a global scale with the click of a button, but it takes some learning to get the hang of how they work.

Important lesson learned---set up your workflow and files correctly before you start, to save time later!

I mentioned this in another post somewhere.

If you do all your work in PS, continue to do your text layouts so you can get your dialog bubbles in place. When you're ready to go to print, turn off the layers where your text resides and re-typeset it in InDesign. Import your page artwork into InDesign (you're going to have to do this anyway at print prep time) and sub in your text where the word bubbles are. When this goes to print, your fonts will be razor sharp as they are rendered apart from the graphic image.

If you flatten everything in PS and import it into InDesign later, you'll notice some anti-aliasing in your fonts, and they won't be as crisp during the output. It's okay if your image is a bit on the soft side, but your text should not - people pick up on fuzzy words very easily, and have a hard time reading it if there's a slight blurred edge.

@drezz--instead of reimporting, you can actually turn on and off layers in imported images through indesign's link palette. OR if you just update the linked file in PS by turning off the layers you don't want, you go back into the links palette and update the links---then MAGIC!

Oh yeah! That's right - I always forget about the seamless workflow between AI/PS and InDesign. I'm old school - I learned using Quark XPress which was a huge bitch, but it really made me aware of how to properly set up your files and not be sloppy as a majority of new designers are.

Our printers love us - half their production work is done before they get the files.

Have you tried copy paste into notepad, then copy paste again into InDesign? Often the kind of problems you mention are from the clipboard trying to copy something more complex than simple text. Notepad forces it to be simple text.



When you adjust the style sheets, do you have problems with the text flowing out of the bubbles you've drawn? Making you have to go back and readjust the text to fit each individual bubble? Or Is InDesign that much smarter?

@Ecna - Most of the time when I've had to take copy from Photoshop (that I might have used as a place holder when building an image) and pasted it into Illustrator or inDesign, I haven't had a problem and it's copied over fine. A couple of times when I've tried to copy over paragraphs of copy, it didn't work as well (so I just went back to the Word file and copied it from there).

For word balloons which are short bits of copy, you should be good. You'll lose any styling that you might have done, you're point size, leading and kerning will all be lost too, but it doesn't change the copy or anything. You just have to redo that stuff. Copying into Notepad will basically do the same thing and strip any styles, so it's just an extra step.

Your second question to Chris I can try to answer too since I've set up paragraph and character styles for my GN... Yes it could NOT fit in the text box, depending on how much you change the type. So if you make it larger, increase the leading, or swap the font to something completely different, this could happen. The paragraph/character styles work great in terms of changing ALL the copy at once if you decide to make an edit. But you'll still have to manually check that you haven't lost anything once you've done this. Even if inDesign could do it, I never trust the software enough to not go back and double check it myself. I've had enough screw ups over the years that I've learned that's part of the process.

@drezz- you MIGHT be able to set up your word balloons with object styles and try to to a universal size increase through there. I've never tried it, but that would be the first solution i'd try.

OR

You could try looking into creating a word balloon "font" basically taking all the dif shapes you might use(it'll be the same as using a dingbat font) and making them their own font, then you can control it through character styles. That requires some work to set up, but if you think you'll be changing sizes that often it could be worth it.

OR

you could just go back manually and adjust each one. Its the biggest pain, but the best results will come from it. Sometimes manual is still best.