Words should not disappear at the edge
Fit policy is explicit: reflow in the balloon, fit the balloon to text, or show overflow. A long translation reports overflow instead of quietly shrinking type, and one command re-fits it.
Built foundation
Letter the page without flattening it.
Varve treats a balloon as a small editable composition: ordinary text, an ordinary body, and one or more ordinary tails held together by a reversible recipe. Dialogue wraps to the shape of the balloon, tails bend and aim, and the words stay selectable text — in the same document, with the same typography, layers, selection, and export systems.
PAGE 01 · CITY BLOCK
We can still make the last train.
Meanwhile, above the station...
CLACK
Text stays textEdit the words, font, language, and writing mode in place.
Wrapping follows the shapeRound balloons narrow their first and last lines so the stack echoes the outline.
Tails bend and aimDrag the endpoint, curve it, widen it, flip it, or give one balloon two tails.
What it is
Comic lettering builds on Varve's existing text, strokes, effects, warp, group, layer, page, and export foundations. It does not create a separate Comic workspace or a second text engine. A speech balloon is a selected group with a shared recipe, so body and tail nodes remain available for ordinary editing and the source text remains available for localization. Fitting never reduces the font size; overflow is a visible state you can act on.
Designed around real lettering problems
Dialogue should not run in a ribbon
Wrapping a single-line text node into a balloon caps the measure and stacks the dialogue. The first and last lines narrow so the text mass follows a round balloon, with the longest line near the middle.
Tails should be part of the balloon
Tails are ordinary nodes with a curve, a base width, a flip, and a remove. Thought balloons draw the conventional chain of decreasing circles, and the tail tip stays put when the body is fitted.
Key capabilities
- Balloon recipes: speech, thought, caption, whisper, shout, burst, and cloud treatments built from editable scene nodes — the burst and cloud outlines are resizable star shapes, not imported artwork
- Contour-aware wrapping: line widths derived from the number of lines the dialogue forms, shared by selection, editing, paint, and export
- Tail editing: one or more tails, an editable endpoint, curve and base width, flip, remove, and a detach action for deliberate freeform edits
- Text-aware fitting: shared text geometry reports fit, near-overflow, or overflow without mutating the document, and fitting never shrinks the type
- Text-effect presets: sound effect, outline, whisper, electronic, display title, and body-text presets are patches over ordinary text fields — no outlined glyphs, no rasterized SFX, and dialogue stays editable
- Direct editing: double-click anywhere on a balloon to edit its dialogue, and copied balloons keep their own body, tail, and text references
- Page structure: comic, manga, and webtoon-vertical starting profiles with page order, panel metadata, reading direction, and bounded slice planning
- Accessible review: named controls, keyboard-reachable Inspector actions, and status text that explains why a balloon needs attention
Honest status
The editable balloon foundation is in the beta. Speaker-target placement, joined balloons with shared outlines, a canvas draw-a-balloon tool, vertical contour columns, and full publisher upload automation are intentionally not presented as complete. Tails added by hand to a burst or cloud balloon anchor at the text box rather than the outer edge. Webtoon and Tapas limits remain dated, source-linked export guidance rather than hard-coded platform promises.
See the typography guide for the shared text model and the file-format guide for document dependencies and export boundaries.