Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 59

Just following the pattern of the previous posts, here are the changes for the other example shots for Empire in the first post, for Spanish and 50% scaled Czech. Top is current, bottom is new.

I’ve asked Harmy to confirm the 50% scaled down subtitles still look right on his personal home theatre setup, because that’s honestly what they’re designed for.

All input is appreciated. I’ll get lots of feedback and run lots of tests before I settle on something final. Just because I’m sold on something today doesn’t mean I’m beyond convincing. Noto has lots of advantages over Arial that I could still get even if I ditch SemiCondensed. I’d also suggest trying to look at the font not side-by-side with Arial, though – while it’s a great way to see all the differences, Arial is a pretty wide font, so it may make a narrow font seem even narrower in contrast. Instead of the little side-by-side images, click through to one of the larger images and let it be the only one you can see, wait a bit, then see if it still seems too condensed when it’s not right next to Arial.

EDIT: There are complicating factors with ditching SemiCondensed, though. I believe the standard-width Noto font has what I’d consider an inconsistency between the capital and lowercase letters – the capitals seem more condensed than the lowercase. It’s not a huge issue but I kinda don’t like it (I’ll also double-check, it may have been some other variant that had this issue, like just the Medium weight or some such thing). More definitely, regular Noto is sometimes even wider than Arial, especially once you start adding weight to it, and I’m fairly set in my opinion that Arial is too wide for the job. SemiCondensed doesn’t have either problem – everything is the same amount of condensed, and it’s narrower than Arial even at a higher weight. So if we’re staying with Noto at all, SemiCondensed has an inherent advantage there. Also the fact that the proportions are very similar to the burnt-in alien subtitles in Star Wars and Jedi gives it a certain stylistic/thematic advantage in my mind. So if I ditch SemiCondensed, it’ll probably be for a different font entirely, and that will take some doing.

Another option is to just stretch the fonts horizontally. However, that will have a distorting effect as at some point in the stretching, the vertical strokes will start to seem thicker than the horizontal strokes. I could also start with a wider font and condense it, which has the opposite problem (and possibly also the inconsistency problem). I don’t like to stretch fonts as a general rule, but small adjustments might be doable if there’s a worthwhile improvement – I actually already do this for very long subtitles lines that go outside the display’s title-safe area (which is an issue for a handful of Greek and Russian subs), but never condense more than around 5%.

After some feedback, it looks like our attempt to make Thai and Arabic use more modern fonts will be reverted back. The traditional style is commonly used for subtitling and it just looks weird to do something else. So Noto Sans is out for these two. I’ll definitely just switch to Noto Serif for Thai, and I’ll try to use Noto Naskh for Arabic – and if that doesn’t work, it’s back to Arial for Arabic.

PM sent.

Just nailed down the final options affecting appearance – I just thinned the black border around the letters, which was designed more for DVD’s/showing up on an SD CRT. New border will be thinner by default, but will be thickened on DVD downscales. Some of the previous mockups are down, but you can see the old thick black border pretty well on the shot of Vader from ESB with Spanish subs.

PM Sent. Forced subtitles in this project are now called “titles”, to better indicate what’s covered (onscreen text).

PM sent, and thanks!

PM sent.

FWIW, I took a look through many fonts that are naturally narrower than Arial in an attempt to address Bluto’s concerns about Noto Sans SemiCondensed. I was very sorely tempted by Myriad Pro, which at the same height and weight was only slightly wider than Noto SemiCondensed and was a stylistic close match as well, but at least for now I’ve decided to stick with Noto Sans. Also, I learned some stuff. At least for Noto, Condensed is 20% narrower than Regular, SemiCondensed is 10% narrower.

So if this whole thing blows up on me, Myriad Pro may be my Plan B. But that plan looks a lot like an iPod commercial 😉

PM sent.

notoryous: PM sent.

bromeo: Not yet. I’m redoing a lot of appearance-related things and posting mockups and soliciting feedback, but none of that will be available until 10.1. The screenshots in the first post are always pretty up-to-date with the currently available version.

EDIT: There are two things that would probably trigger a release of 10.1 – the impending release of Despecialized Empire 2.5, and a complete new set of Arabic translations (we’re currently two out of three on that score, so it’s coming). Also, if I start to just get embarrassed about the current state of the project, which isn’t that likely right now, but the chances increase every time I see a screenshot with the current Arial font.

PM sent.

PM sent. I’d love corrections for Korean (or any other language) if anyone has any to suggest.

PM sent, and please let me know if you spot any problems with Romanian. You may be my first customer for those, and those were based on OCR scans of the official Blu-ray subs with rampant typos, so there’s a good chance some improvements could be made.