Electricwoods LLC of Japan and Digital Lynx Systems Inc. of Canada have released MangaLoft 1.0, a manga drawing application for iPad and Mac. The app is built around the manga page rather than a blank canvas, bringing panel layout, inking, screentones, lettering, and collaboration into a single workspace. The announcement signals a push to streamline a production workflow that traditionally spans multiple tools, potentially reducing friction for both solo artists and distributed teams.
Instead of starting with an empty canvas, artists can divide a page into panels and draw within them, with panel frames adjustable as the page develops. Pressure-sensitive brushes support expressive inking with Apple Pencil on iPad or a pen tablet on Mac, including adjustable taper and stabilization. The app also includes dot and gradient screentones, speed lines, and focus lines, and artists can adjust a tone's shape after placing it. Speech balloons and tails can be reshaped, while lettering tools support horizontal and vertical Japanese text, ruby characters, and outlined text.
For teams working in different locations, MangaLoft lets collaborators share a manuscript through the cloud. Artists check out pages or layers to divide the work and avoid overwriting one another, and a reviewer can be invited to leave comments without drawing on the manuscript. The Workbench feature lets an artist focus on a single panel and continue working on it on another device. These capabilities matter because manga production often involves writers, assistants, letterers, and editors working in sequence or in parallel; built-in checkouts and reviewer access could reduce version conflicts and handoff errors.
MangaLoft is free to download, and drawing, page editing, and collaboration are available without a subscription. Exporting a finished page for screen or print requires MangaLoft Plus, with options including PNG, TIFF, and PDF, plus print settings such as bleed and registration marks. That split pricing model lowers the barrier to entry for hobbyists and small studios while charging only those who need production-ready output. MangaLoft 1.0 is available for iPad and Mac on the App Store. More information is available at https://mangaloft.org/.
