Saturday, March 30, 2013  Lowering the Boom  In the olden times
of translating comics, foreign sound effects had to be whited
out and then the relevant text painstakingly handwritten to
ensure that the replaced font would match the artist's
handwriting.  Compared to  that laborious practice, passing the
torch of letterers to computer programs can seem like a quick
fix.  Programs like these are a boon for people with excellent
drawing, but lousy lettering.  (Nothing can be done to fix lousy
writing though - computers haven't learned how to become
influential editors yet)  There are notable detractors who'll
lament the cold usage of static font that displays none of the
warmth of a finely honed penmanship, even as modern writing has
relied more on typewritten texts than lead on paper.  Some
programs have gotten so good that they're able to blur the line
between human and machine perfectly.  However, this is still a
long way off, since defects do occasionally pop up.  One such
occurrence is in Papercutz's Smurfs