Merrimo User Guide › Comic canvas and pages

Draw and layout comic panels on Mac

In Merrimo on your Mac, you can frame your story action by drawing panels with customizable gutters, reference your manuscript live, and scale layouts proportionally.

Draw a new panel

Create rectangular panel containers directly on the canvas:

1. In Merrimo on your Mac, press P (or R) to arm the Panel tool.
2. Click and drag on the page where you want the panel to appear.
3. Release the mouse button to create the panel frame.
4. Use the corner and edge bounding handles to resize the panel or adjust its aspect ratio.

Work in the panel inspector

Select a panel and open the Inspector (⌥⌘I). Its controls are in three groups, one under the other: Panel (the panel's framing, cast, description, caption and dialogue), Image (making and changing its picture) and Style (its position, shape and border). Click a group's header to open or close it, and Option-click a header to open only that group and close the others.

The groups you leave open stay open as you select one panel after another. If you are working on pictures, leave only Image open and move from panel to panel. While you scroll, the header of the group you're in stays at the top. A closed group's header sums up what's inside: the panel's status (when Panel status is on) and shot, which take is showing, or the shape and border.

A panel you draw yourself has nothing in its story yet, so it has no Panel group: its status and Regen sit at the top of Image. Panel appears as soon as anything is in the panel's story, such as a description from the agent, an adaptation of your text, or a character added under Image's References.

A balloon or caption has Image and Style. What it says is the first section of Style, above its position and size. A loose image has Image and Style, and so do several selected things. With Use AI off, the Image group is hidden. When only one group is left, it has no header and is always open. Locked and the Delete button sit at the bottom of the Inspector, whichever groups are open.

Read your script while you lay out pages

The canvas sidebar's second tab, Source Text, right after Pages, shows a chapter of your manuscript. Pick the chapter from the menu at the top of the tab, which shows the chapter's title. The bar at the bottom of the sidebar shows how many words the chapter has.

The ⋯ button beside the chapter menu holds the tab's options. Follow Selection and Show Coverage are also in the View menu while the tab is showing, and when you Control-click the text. Both start out on.

• With Follow Selection on, selecting a panel on the canvas scrolls the text to the paragraph the panel came from, switching chapter when it needs to.
• Show Coverage marks the text that is already in the comic.
• Prose Font… opens the Fonts window to choose the typeface of your manuscript. Bigger and Smaller change its size a point at a time. The font is the same one Prose mode uses.
• You can edit the text here, as in Prose mode (⌥1).

Drag screenplay lines onto a page

Under the chapter menu, Prose and Screenplay switch the tab between the chapter's prose and its screenplay. Screenplay shows the chapter's scene headings, action and speeches as written; a chapter without a screenplay says so (adapt one from the prose in Prose mode).

• Click a line to pick it, ⇧-click another to pick everything between, or ⌘-click to add or remove one line.
• Drag the picked lines onto an empty spot on a page to make a new panel there. Action becomes the panel's description, each line of dialogue becomes a balloon word for word, the scene heading sets the place, and speakers and names are matched to your cast.
• Hold ⌥ as you drop onto a panel to add the lines to that panel instead: their dialogue goes in as new balloons after its own, and their action is added to its description.
• With Show Coverage on, lines already in a panel on a page are tinted and say where, such as “On Page 3 · Panel 1”.
• Choose Edit ▸ Undo (⌘Z) to take back a drop in one step.

Generate panels and place them

The canvas sidebar's third tab, Panels, lists the storyboard panels Merrimo drafted from your prose or screenplay that aren't on the canvas yet.

• Click All Chapters at the top of the tab and choose a chapter to see only its panels. Choose All Chapters again to see them all.
• Click the ✦ button beside it to generate panels. With a chapter picked, it opens that chapter's options: Update draws only new or changed paragraphs, Start Over drafts a fresh set, and you can set about how many panels to aim for, with a suggestion for the chapter's length (in an Update, for just the new paragraphs). With All Chapters picked, it lists the chapters to choose from.
• When the chapter has no panels yet, the list shows those same options right there, under No Panels Yet and the chapter's length: set them and click Generate Panels.
• From picks what the panels are drawn from: The screenplay (the chapter's Fountain screenplay, the first choice when the chapter has one) or The prose. A chapter's panels come from one or the other: switching makes a fresh set, keeping the panels on the canvas and final panels. Without a screenplay, choose Adapt the Screenplay… to write one from the prose; Adapt the Screenplay Again… replaces it, asking first.
• From the screenplay, scene headings set the place, names match your cast, and every word of dialogue is kept. From the prose, balloons keep the author's sentences whole, word for word. Either way, turn on Let the AI trim dialogue to fit balloons to let it shorten long lines.
• The AI can letter a speech too long for one balloon as connected balloons, splitting it between sentences without changing a word. When you place the panel, the speech appears as joined balloons, and only the first has a tail.
• Turn on Quick, no AI to make the panels straight from the screenplay, instantly: one panel per action paragraph and one per exchange of dialogue (or per speech, with One panel per exchange of dialogue off). Descriptions are the screenplay's own words and shot types stay empty; refine any panel with ✦ afterwards. With no text model set up, panels from the screenplay are always made this way.
• While panels generate, a bar at the top of the list shows how far along it is; click Stop in it to stop. The panels appear in the list as each beat finishes.
• Anything the run couldn't do, such as a character not yet in your cast, is listed under the bar as a warning. Click the × beside one to dismiss it, or Dismiss All to clear them all.
• Click All, Draft, Regen or Final to show only panels with that status (with Panel status turned on in Settings > Advanced). Select All selects every panel shown.
• Drag one panel onto the canvas to place it where you drop it.
• Select two or more panels (⌘-click or ⇧-click, or Select All) and a card appears over the top-left corner of the canvas. Where picks On Pages, which lays them out on the pages using the Style, Density, Spacing and the switches below it, or Beside Pages, which lines them up next to the pages for you to place by hand. Then click Arrange. While the card is up, the canvas outlines where the panels will go.
• In the same card, Draft Prompts writes a new image prompt for each selected panel and Render Images renders their pictures. While they run, the card shows how far along they are, with Stop, even after you deselect.
• Click the trash button in the card to delete the selected panels (⌘Z brings them back), or Deselect to put the card away.
• When every panel is placed, the list says All Panels Placed, counts the paragraphs added since, and shows the same options, starting with Update or Start Over; click Update Panels to draw what's new.
• The bar at the bottom of the sidebar shows how many panels the chapter has and how many drafts are left to place.

Put things in front or behind

Where panels, pictures and balloons overlap, the one in front covers the others. To change which is in front, select it and use the arrange commands:

• Bring to Front (⌥⌘]) moves the selection all the way to the front. Bring Forward (⌘]) moves it one step forward.
• Send to Back (⌥⌘[) moves the selection all the way to the back. Send Backward (⌘[) moves it one step backward.

Scale several things at once

Scale entire multi-panel layouts without distorting captions or balloons:

1. Drag a selection box around multiple panels, captions, and dialogue balloons.
2. Drag any corner handle inward or outward. The entire layout resizes proportionally.
3. Captions resize with the panels, while speech balloons keep their readable text size while following their host panel.

With Snap to Grid on, the edge you drag lands on a grid line; hold ⌘ to scale freely. Drag the handle to the edge of the canvas and hold it there to scroll the canvas and keep scaling.