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Alien subtitle fonts

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Hello everyone,

I was just curious if anyone here could answer a question. Upon the release of the Disney Plus 4k transfers I noticed that the alien subtitles were no longer in the usual Franklin Gothic font and instead simply in the normal system font.

Could someone verify for me if the 2011 Blu Ray’s had the Franklin Gothic font for the alien subtitles? I’m pretty sure they did. I know they were not burned in but I think they used SUP files of some sort to still make them formatted in the correct font. Am I correct about this?

On that same front, would you guys expect if Disney releases these 4k transfers to Blu Ray UHD for them to format the subtitles in the usual font? After all, since The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Mandalorian all retained this Franklin Gothic style font it seems odd that they would ditch it for the original films.

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My guess is that the streaming version use “soft subtitles”, which, like you said, use the system font.

AFAIK Blu-rays can have subtitles use just about any typeface so that’s why it has the Franklin Gothic. I’d imagine that will continue for the foreseeable future.

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Streaming services generally use text fonts that are rendered on the client (using the system or user-specified font). Blu-rays use graphical fonts that could technically be any image at all, but are usually just pre-rendered text with a specified font, size and position. Technically they could use burnt-in subtitles if they wanted it to look consistent between streaming and disc versions, but that would cause problems with international releases.

So I imagine the Blu-rays will revert to the Franklin Gothic appearance.

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)