A little more info on the font issue:
One of the things I’d been thinking about going into this was how in one of my many PM discussions over the years, someone said they preferred to use Project Threepio’s “matching” English subtitles. That’s fine and all, but the reason they preferred them was that they felt they were easier to read–they weren’t really that interested in the matching aspect. And he was right–the matching subs were both larger and thicker than the standard English subs.
With that in mind, looking up at the bottom of the three examples in the image I just posted, that font starts looking… familiar. Sure, it’s not an exact match, but proportion-wise, wow, I pretty much just picked a close match for the Greedo font, didn’t I? Of course I did just ditch the square periods for round ones, but nobody’s perfect.
I don’t plan on changing the height of the fonts very much from what they’ve been. I tested that original size on various real-world (read: small, crappy) TV setups, and it worked, and it also seems to roughly match what you see on commercial disks. As for nice wall-sized home theatre setups, that’s what the scale_subs script is for. The newer font is narrower, so the letters seem smaller at approximately the same height, but it’s also thicker, so I’d call it a wash (other opinions welcome).
As for things I’m still wrestling with, there’s the CJK fonts. Those are not condensed fonts, so they’ll look wider, and you’ll see that especially with Cantonese, where there are lots of Latin characters mixed in. The sans-serif fonts are also not currently available in semibold, so I’ve opted for medium – semibold was about as thick as I was willing to go. And for some crazy reason, Pango isn’t able to render any of these CJK fonts on Windows. Which is fine – for the first few years, I couldn’t render subtitles on anything but Windows, so I guess it’s only fair for Linux to get an exclusive feature. Unless I figure out how to fix it.
Then there’s SDH. If I make the text easier to read, does that obviate the need for the black background? Very few commercial disks use it. But I don’t want to do anything to compromise intelligibility for our deaf viewers, so maybe not.
I think that’s it. I’m increasingly sold on the concept of using Noto Sans for every single subtitle. Medium for CJK, SemiCondensed SemiBold for everything else.