Oct 05 2009
Some intensive code churn to ComicBake; small changes at front
It’s been a week or so since I posted any updates about ComicBake, mostly because I’ve been taking several steps backwards in order to move forward again. Typical manoeuvre.
I replace Brent’s Diagrams library with bindings to GD, which gives more pixel-accurate control over sizes and locations of objects. Diagrams is really good for geometric stuff (and, eh, diagrams) but not so hot for accurate overlays.
The result is a lot of code churn with not an awful lot to show on the outside. The speech bubbles have become smaller and thinner, the edges have squared off and the dialogue tails have disappeared. All because I haven’t got round to adding them back again.
The major point of changing the graphics back end was to get reliable sizing and placement of objects, which will help me work through various methods of placing speech bubbles in a natural(ish) way. Some points which have come to mind.
Having speech bubbles overlapping slightly from left to right is not a problem. But when going from right back to left it can be confusing. Thus the conversation above. “This is just…” flows naturally into “Is that because…” but the “Um” then seems lost. It should be definitely lower than the second bubble, to make the order of speech clearer.
In a left/right conversation like the one illustrated, the most natural arrangement of bubbles is an interleaving pattern in the large gap down the middle of the screen. Each person’s dialogue should be shifted slightly in their direction. I have an idea that aligning the near edge of the bubbles vertically would look “right” also, but until I’ve actually seen what that looks right I can’t say for certain.
I would dearly love to know if there is any theory behind the placement of speech bubbles. Even if it’s just heuristic/aesthetic stuff like rules of thirds and so on. And, if this doesn’t seem a strange idea, advice on dealing with pathological arrangements — such as where the character at the bottom of the page speaks first, then one at the top.
Thoughts on this always appreciated.
In other news, the GD library has given me exact size data for my speech bubbles before I write them to the image. I can actually arrange the speech bubbles in the space knowing what size they’ll be in the end. This is good for the morale! I got to discard my rather annoying guessing function, which was slightly wrong in 100% of cases. Good riddance to that one.
Also making better use of the type system and typeclasses to harden some assumptions and reuse some of the same principles in different places. No doubt there are plenty more places this can be done. For now I’m going to stop fiddling with the graphics stuff and pay more attention to layout. Choosing where speech bubbles go is a fundamental part of the function of this program, and it’ll probably require some serious thinking and experimentation. I’m looking forward to it.
As usual, code can be browsed in the repository or checkout out locally with Darcs:
darcs get --partial http://www.dougalstanton.net/code/comicbake/