Manual

Manual

The complete reference for the Platemaker desktop application — what every window, dialog and control does.

What this manual covers

For the author's own end-to-end process — iPad to published chapter — see Comic production instead.

Start here

If you are new, read these three in order:

1. Installation — get the app running
2. Quick start — first workspace to first render
3. Concepts — the vocabulary the rest of the manual assumes

Reference

Page	Covers
Main window	Layout, panels, docks, status bar
Workspaces	Creating, opening and saving .platemaker.json
Packages	Exporting and opening a self-contained .platemaker.zip
Projects	Chapters, input files, ordering and sorting
Canvas profiles	Canvas dimensions, margins, assignment
Templates	Generating margin-guide PNGs to draw on
Output profiles	Slice size, format, encoding options
Rendering	Running, stopping and re-running the pipeline
File statuses	What each tile badge means
Menu reference	Every menu action and keyboard shortcut
Troubleshooting	When something does not work

Conventions used in this manual

• Menu paths are written as Menu → Action.
• Control names are in bold and match the on-screen label exactly.
• File and folder paths are in code.
• The format is called a vertical-scroll comic; "webtoon" is used as the everyday name for it. Platform names appear only where a preset targets a specific platform's published specifications — see Trademarks.
• Spelling is British throughout, matching the codebase.

Who this is written for. Someone who draws. It assumes you are comfortable with pixel dimensions and image file formats, and it does not assume you know what chroma subsampling or a compression effort level is — those get a line of explanation where they come up, not a lecture.

What is described. Current behaviour, always. Anything not yet working, or known to be changing, is marked as such where it appears rather than quietly left out. Facts that come from outside Platemaker — a publishing platform's size limits, say — carry the date they were last checked, because they go stale without anyone touching this wiki.

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See also: Home · About · Comic production