FWIW, I got tired of not having a good enough font match for the Star Wars subtitles, so I made a font. It’s derived from Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, but I modified the character widths, inter-character spacing, and a few of the characters themselves that didn’t match (lowercase “g” being most obvious).
The bad thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s still not perfect, and probably never will be. Kerning, character spacing, and character widths are still not quite right at an individual character level, but a complete line of characters takes up approximately the same amount of space as the theatrical subtitles (but of course this also varies a bit). Some subtler character differences are also still present – the theatrical font has a kind of boxy lowercase “e”, while mine is still more rounded like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond. But I got the g, y, r, question mark, comma, etc, so it’s certainly closer than it was before. It’s designed to work with Star Wars at regular weight, and Jedi with bold weight, since Jedi’s alien subs are thicker.
The good thing about being based on an existing font is that even if the spacing and kerning aren’t theatrical, they still look very good. Amateur specialty fonts constructed from scratch tend to have completely haphazard letter spacing, so I’d guess that’s not a simple thing for an amateur like me to do. Another good thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s complete. A font based on scans and vectorizations of theatrical subtitles would be limited to those characters. This one has a full Latin alphabet, plus Cyrillic and Greek for good measure. But this bring up another downside – accented versions of any modified characters are not modified. i.e. a lowercase y with umlauts is exactly like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, while a lowercase y with no accent marks has been modified to more closely match theatrical.
Anyway, I’ll include this font with the inevitable next release of Project Threepio, but it could be a long time before that happens.