Chapter 1. Getting Familiar with the Story Features

Manga Studio 5 is a great all-around drawing software. But it's primarily a comic creation software, and as such the Multiple Pages feature is its bread and butter. The Page Manager tab functions like a book, allowing you to see zoomed-out versions of all the pages in your comic at once, open them individually, drag-and-drop them to new locations, and add or delete pages from your story at will. It's the thumbnail view of your story—the digital equivalent of having your pages laid out on index cards and shuffling them around as you please. It's a CMC file that points to individual image files of your pages in one convenient location so that you no longer have to keep track of separate files, like in other graphics programs.

In this chapter we are going to learn the following:

• Making a new story file
• Creating and working with custom page templates
• Saving custom page templates
• Navigating the Story tab
• Organizing pages
• Viewing options
• Easy text entry with the Story Editor mode
• Changing font face and size

Let's get started!