Project files have been updated to version 9.1 (codename: “Overengineering Strikes Back”), first post has been updated, please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

The change that may take the most time to adjust to is that I switched all the language codes from ISO 639-1 (two letters) to ISO 639-3 (three letters). Why? I’d initially thought there would be no way on Earth I’d ever add support for a language outside the 180-odd language codes covered by ISO 639-1, but it seems I may have been wrong. This change lays the groundwork for future language support, but there’s nothing in this release that requires it. Yet 😉
Added titles-only support for the Navajo dub of Star Wars, and included a modified version of MuxMan that allows you to create DVDs using the correct language code for Navajo. However, I am not adding Navajo to my list of supported languages, since there are still no complete Navajo subtitles for any of the films
Similarly, added titles-only support for the currently incomplete Hindi dubs (thanks to Anuj)
Improved European Portuguese translations (thanks to stormpack)
Improved Turkish translation for Jedi (thanks to aserdaryakut)
Improved Castilian translations (thanks to Hostmaster and carlosmon)
Improved Greek translation for Star Wars (thanks to sf999)
Fixed typo in Japanese translation for Star Wars (thanks to DevilWing)
“Matching” subtitles have been reworked to much more closely resemble theatrical alien subtitles. Example screenshots in the first post have been updated.
As part of the matching subtitle project, included newly-created fonts that, at the right size and weight, closely resemble the theatrical alien subtitles (on English-language prints, at least)
Added new utilities, subtitles and procedures to better support preservations without burnt-in alien subtitles
Added new utilities and procedures to allow users to scale graphical subtitles (33%-110%) to a size more appropriate for their display, while maintaining all of the formatting and positioning niceties (i.e. for large projection screens – thanks to Harmy for the inspiration and the large-screen testing) An example screenshot has been added to the first post.
Project Threepio is now 1080p-native, with 720p subtitles available as downscales, rather than the reverse. A side-effect of this change is that the 1080p files are a lot smaller, and the whole project archive is noticeably smaller (although it’s still quite large), as my previous upscaling script had a bug that needlessly inflated the file sizes.

Project Threepio’s matching subtitles are now designed to match theatrical prints rather than specific preservations. Because of this, they do not match Star Wars Despecialized 2.5 as well as they used to, but future Despecialized releases, including towne32’s color adjusted Despecialized Edition, will match better because they’ll be more theatrically accurate.

Up until now, supporting preservations without burnt-in subtitles has really worked well only for non-English subtitles. You just shifted the subtitles back down to the bottom of the frame, and you were done. But because English subtitles are missing the alien text, assuming they’ll be burnt-in, the past solution was to re-render new English subtitles from an alternate SRT file. However, that wasn’t really good enough – the alien subtitles rendered in this fashion wouldn’t look anywhere near as nice as the burnt-in subtitles, as they wouldn’t be the right font, and so on. Even if you used the new improved matching subtitles, it wouldn’t be good enough.

So in this version, I’ve added a new kind of graphical-only subtitle: “alien”, which subtitle only the alien dialogue, and look almost exactly like the theatrical alien subtitles (they’re graphical-only because they’re based on 35mm scans, not rendered from a font). In addition to these graphical subs, there’s a new script called submerge, which merges native (or matching) subtitles with alien subtitles to produce subtitles that cover every line of dialogue, while retaining the closest possible theatrical fidelity for the sections with subtitled alien dialogue.

The results are really, really good. A sub-free preservation could use the “alien” subtitles as the default track, then use merged subtitles for people who want to watch with English subtitles – and while the results can’t ever be quite as perfect as with burnt-in subtitles, they’d be awfully close. Theoretically, this same method could be used to create theatrically accurate alien subtitles in other languages, using scans of international prints. You could even use the new Project Threepio Matching fonts to produce credible imitations of the threatrical subtitles in some other languages.