logo Sign In

Post #1496620

Author
CatBus
Parent topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1496620/action/topic#1496620
Date created
25-Jul-2022, 2:15 PM

Building on some things I mentioned earlier, adding Nastaliq scripts (Urdu and Afghan Persian) was a little more difficult than your average new script. Other scripts have varying levels of conformity to a consistent baseline and character height. Chinese characters (at least in Noto Sans CJK) are the best at this. Given even a fairly small sample of characters, it’s pretty easy to gauge exactly where they should be placed, and know exactly how much vertical space they will take. Latin characters are slightly more complicated, with descenders going below the baseline, and accents sometimes exceeding the normal max height. Until now, the scripts that played around most in that arena were Burmese and Thai – but still, pretty tame, relatively speaking.

Nastaliq threw all that out the window. There are huge vertical variances, with a baseline that’s more theoretical than ever before. So it takes up quite a lot of vertical space, but it also threw a wrench into a lot of my old processes.

For example: dual subtitles. If you want dual English and Chinese subtitles, no problem. The Chinese subtitles get shifted down into the black bars, the English subtitles stay where they are, and everything just works. But if you wanted to make dual English and Afghan Persian subtitles, the Nastaliq subtitles take up so much vertical space that, even pushed down as far into the black bars as possible, they will still overlap the English subtitles. So, in that case, I shift the English subtitles up into the top black bars, and then you can have two sets of subtitles going with no overlap.

Another case was “unshifted” subtitles. There are cases where, for example, if you’re dealing with a Star Wars preservation with no burnt-in subtitles, you will no longer want subtitles for the alien dialog to be shifted to the top of the screen. So “unshifting” these subtitles requires calculating where these subtitles should now be placed, and the existing formulas broke hard for Nastaliq. And to be honest, they were also a little broken for Thai and Burmese as well. Now, they all work great.

Anyway, that’s just an example of how adding a new language isn’t always a simple matter of plugging in a new SRT file and loading a new font. Localization is hard!