Quick start

From a fresh install to your first rendered chapter.

Before you begin

You need your exported pages available on this machine. They do not have to sit in one folder — Platemaker can take a whole directory at once or individual files you pick — and they do not have to be in the right order, because you can fix that after importing.

Platemaker is installed and starts; see Installation if not.

1. Create a workspace

File → New workspace, then choose where the .platemaker.json file goes.

A workspace holds everything about one comic: its chapters, its profiles, its settings. Most people need exactly one per series. Pick its location deliberately — templates, if you ever generate any, are written next to it. See Workspaces.

2. Create a project

Right-click an empty part of the Workspace panel and choose New. One project is one chapter or episode; name it after the chapter. See Projects.

3. Add your input images

On the Input tab, use Add inputs from directory to take a whole folder, or Add input files to pick individually. Both are additive, so you can do one and then the other.

4. Check the order

The tiles are stitched together top to bottom in the order shown, so this is the one step worth slowing down for.

Use the sort control for a first pass — sorting by name is numeric-aware, so page2 comes before page10 — then drag any stragglers into place, or use the up and down buttons on each tile. See Projects.

5. Choose an output profile and directory

Switch to the Output tab and select Webtoon Standard from the profile list. It ships with every workspace and needs no setup: 800 px wide, 1280 px slices.

Then set the output directory — this is where your finished panels will be written.

See Output profiles.

6. Render

Press Render, or F5.

The progress bar and log fill the bottom panel, and output tiles appear as each panel is written. See Rendering.

7. Find your slices

On the Output tab, press Open output directory. Your panels are there, numbered in order — output_001, output_002, and so on — so that sorting by filename gives you the upload order.

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Do you need a canvas profile?

Not for this. Platemaker scales every page to the output width as it reads it, so a render works without any canvas profile defined at all — which is why they are absent from the steps above.

They earn their place as soon as you want two things:

• Margins. A canvas profile is what tells Platemaker there is a border to crop off each page before it joins the strip. Without one, whatever you drew is what gets published.
• Determinism. With profiles defined, each page is matched by its exact pixel size and handled the same way every time, and the profile tells you which canvas size to set up in your drawing app.

See Canvas profiles when you get there.

What next

• Concepts — the vocabulary the rest of the manual assumes

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See also: Concepts · Main window · Troubleshooting