Electricwoods LLC of Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan, and Digital Lynx Systems Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, have announced the release of MangaLoft 1.0, a manga drawing application for iPad and Mac. The app is built around the manga page rather than a blank canvas, combining panel layout, inking, screentones, lettering, and collaboration in a single workspace.
The announcement matters because it signals a shift in how digital manga tools are packaged and priced. Instead of beginning with an empty canvas, artists can divide a page into panels and draw within them, adjusting panel frames as the page develops. Pressure-sensitive brushes support expressive inking with Apple Pencil on iPad or a pen tablet on Mac, with adjustable taper and stabilization. MangaLoft 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. A reviewer can be invited to leave comments without drawing on the manuscript. The Workbench lets an artist focus on a single panel and continue working on it on another device.
The pricing model could broaden access to professional-grade manga production tools. 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. Export options include PNG, TIFF, and PDF, with print settings such as bleed and registration marks.
The release also highlights cross-border collaboration between Japanese and Canadian developers targeting a global community of manga artists, studios, and independent creators. MangaLoft 1.0 is available for iPad and Mac on the App Store. More information is available at https://mangaloft.org/.
