One of the neat things about Magna Studio EX (Clip Paint Studio EX if you buy the downloadable version) is it’s book making abilities. It shouldn’t be a surprise since the whole app revolves around making comics and comic books. The panel-based nature of comics also makes for a pretty neat layout tool for image heavy books or magazines.

In my case, it’s also a substitute for Adobe InDesign. For the occasional layout jobs I have, it’s not worth another subscription on top of Lightroom+Photoshop. So after fighting with Lightroom’s crippled book module1 I decided to build a template in Manga Studio that would work with Blurb’s magazine-sized books.

Manga Studio is an odd combination of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign that focused on creating Japanese comics (manga). It’s surprisingly good, but it has it’s downsides. It’s developed in Japan, and the US distributor does the interface translation to English. Which means that it takes a minute to get your head around how it works. It’s not difficult, but it is different. Also it doesn’t use the native interface style of either Windows or Mac, making it just look off.

But what it does, it does very well.

The trick to getting everything to work together is understanding the measurements. For this template we’ll be using points a typography measurement that divides an inch into 72 units. It’s more precise than inches because most design software (Manga Studio included) won’t do thousandths of an inch without rounding. So if you need a bleed with of 0.125” it’ll be rounded to either 0.12” or 0.13”. It’s not critical to get that last thousandth in there, but it can leave a 1 pixel white space on the page. Also, it’s a rare case when you’ll need to split a point. Whole numbers prevent mistakes.

First we need to check Blurb’s Book Size Calculator to get our page sizes for a magazine layout. It uses U.S. standard letter sized paper (8.5”x11”) and selecting 12 pages of premium magazine stock gives us the following measurements.

Look at the Blurb measurement above for Gutter/Spine. It’s 4x810. We on care about the width of 4. Click on the cover thumbnail so we’re only editing that page.

We need to add half of our spine width to the page, because Manga Studio is still thinking in single pages. So each page gets half and together it’ll add up to page width + page width + spine width. Our original page size was 621, so the final cover page width should be 623.

Once that’s done all that’s left is to layout the magazine!

Oh yeah, so how do we get this into a PDF for Blurb?

There’s actually two ways. The first is (on a Mac) to use the PDF export from the print dialog box.

The easiest way is to export each page as a PNG file using Manga Studio’s built-in export system. Then use either Lightroom, Photoshop, or (MacOS) Preview to combine the pages into a PDF.

In either case, Blurb wants the cover in a separate file. This also means that the interior covers will remain blank, so don’t add any art to the pages Manga Studio calls Cover page (back) and Back cover page. So this “12 page” magazine will have eight content pages. Make sure to plan for that.

If you don’t want to do all this setup yourself, you can download the zip file I used to make this tutorial that has all the pages ready to edit.

Also don’t forget that by using Manga Studio EX, you can also export directly to Kindle and ePub formats!