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by tendersej 1545 days ago
Shameless plug: my current project https://www.nekostrips.com aims at making the process as frictionless as possible. Still very rough around the edges, but useful for hobby purposes. I have several improvements in the works.
1 comments

Awesome! I will follow the development and try it out!

Any plans to open source it? Is there a roadmap? My guess is that you’ll be adding custom font support (some unicode isn’t support by mainstream fonts and you can probably find a niche by supporting minority languages). also i suppose you’ll be adding bulk export to common comic book formats like cbz or cbr?

Firstly, thanks for your message, it genuinely made me smile :)

As for your questions:

- No plans to open source it, unless I stop working on it.

As for the roadmap, it is extensive. In random order (both in terms of importance and release horizon) I am planning:

- exports as archives (if I remember properly, .cbr and .cbz formats are just renamed .rar and .zip respectively) as you mentioned

- proper font selection/customization (and eventually, bring your own) as you surmised

- workflow improvements (shortcuts, bulk commands vs current clicking item by item)

- specifying bubble type, from visual type (text in closed bubble opaque or not, text over background) to purpose (speech, onomatopeia, in-world written text, meta explanation) and source (who is talking, to whom, etc)

- moving the current "zoom" level from chapter to series: link to Knowledge Base, for easier lexical reference (with regards to man(ga|hwa|hua) names are often transcriptions of foreign words / names which are often translated back with varying degrees of success).

- multiplayer

- making the app not just usable but ergonomic on mobile screens

- a lot more.

I will add a roadmap section on the app.

Origin story:

I worked as a translator (handwritten medical forms, business communications) during my studies and got interested in what was considered the state of the art for CAT tools. I ended up building my own out of scripts, macros and rule-based processing because nothing provided the ease, flexibility and low overhead I was looking for.

With nekostrips, I am convinced I can deliver a compelling tool for comics.

If you or anyone else feels like discussing further, you can contact me through the form on the app, or on social networks.