Komawari

Pick a layout, drop in your art.

Komawari places it in reading order, right to left, and hands you a file the printer will accept.

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An A5 page with five panels of inked manga. A blue line joins the centres of the panels from right to left, showing the reading order.
1

From a folder of art to a finished chapter, in three moves

There is no manual to study before you start. The three things you will do every day take three gestures.

Pick a layout

A library of ready-made layouts, from one panel to eight. Or type how many you want and Komawari shows you the arrangements that fit.

The page layouts window, with previews of the ready-made arrangements.

Drop in your art

Let the files fall onto the page and they fill the empty panels in the order they are read. Nothing to assign by hand, no numbering to check.

The lower part of the window: the laid-out page and, below it, the tray holding the imported artwork.

Export

Choose the pages and the format. The file comes out with bleed and crop marks, if you need them, and the right measurements inside.

The export window with the formats, the page range, bleed and crop marks.
2

Tilt a cut by dragging a handle

It is what separates a manga page from a western grid. Take the end of the line and rotate it: the panels on either side adjust themselves.

The same page with the cut between the top tier and the row below tilted by nine degrees.
straighttilted 9°
  • ±60° how far a cut will tilt, snapping to the angles people actually use.
  • 4.0 mm the gap between two panels stays that wide on a tilted cut too: it is measured perpendicular to the line, the way the printer sees it.
  • 0 mm² the area one panel steals from its neighbour when you tilt. Neither of them loses out.
3

See the page the way the reader will

With right-hand binding the odd pages sit on the right and are read first. Komawari pairs them the right way round while you work, so you catch the panels that cross the fold now, rather than at the printer's.

Two pages side by side in the editor: on the right, page one with five panels; on the left, page two filled by a single plate bleeding off all four edges.
4

Deliver a file the printer will accept

Without having to learn what bleed is, or how a trim gets declared: Komawari writes the right measurements into the file for you.

Four formats, one for each job

  • PDF the whole chapter in one file, for the printer
  • TIFF lossless, in greyscale or in colour
  • PNG one image per page, at 300 dpi
  • JPEG light, for previews and for the web

It warns you before the printer does

A check runs through the whole chapter and says what is worth a look: panels left empty, artwork that is no longer on the disk, drawings that will not hold up at the scale you placed them. It does not stop you: it lets you know.

The preflight check lists two plates below the required resolution, one at 273 effective dpi and one at 135.
5

Your work stays in a folder of your own

Chapter_01/
├── project.json
├── assets/
│   ├── art_0001.png
│   └── art_0002.png
├── .cache/
│   └── backups/
└── export/
    └── 2026-08-08_1712/

No account, no server, no closed format you can only get out of by exporting. A project is a folder you can open, move to another disk or hand to someone else: inside are your images and a text file that lays them out.

You do not even have to remember to save. Komawari writes on its own two seconds after your last change, and keeps the last five saves for when you want to go further back than undo will take you.

Try it on a real chapter

In the browser you install nothing and the project lives in the page's own storage, with a .zip export to carry it away. On the desktop you work straight inside a folder on your disk.

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