Electricwoods LLC, based in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan, and Digital Lynx Systems Inc., based in 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, combining panel layout, inking, screentones, lettering, and collaboration into one workspace, according to the companies’ announcement.
Rather than starting with a blank canvas, MangaLoft lets artists divide a page into panels and draw within them. Panel frames can be fine-tuned 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. The app also includes dot and gradient screentones, speed lines, and focus lines. 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 allows collaborators to 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 feature lets an artist focus on a single panel and continue working on it on another device.
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. MangaLoft 1.0 is available for iPad and Mac on the App Store. More information is available at https://mangaloft.org/.
The release matters for independent manga artists and small studios because it offers professional page-production tools without a mandatory subscription for core creative work. The panel-first workflow may reduce the friction of moving between layout and drawing, while cloud check-out of pages or layers addresses a common pain point for distributed teams: accidental overwrites. The free tier lowers the barrier to entry, and the paid export tier provides a clear monetization path tied to finished output rather than basic access.
For the broader creative software market, MangaLoft’s approach tests whether artists will embrace an integrated, page-centric environment over general-purpose illustration tools. The inclusion of Japanese text features such as vertical lettering and ruby characters signals a design aimed at authentic manga production, potentially appealing to creators outside Japan who publish for Japanese-language audiences. The collaboration and reviewer-comment features also position the app for studio workflows where editors and assistants need controlled access without risking the manuscript.
The companies said MangaLoft is behind their manga creation efforts for iPad and Mac. The availability of MangaLoft 1.0 on the App Store, with free download and subscription-free drawing, page editing, and collaboration, gives artists a new option to evaluate for end-to-end manga production.
