Info: - Greedo & Jabba subtitles, theatrical placement and fonts - — Page 7

Yes, I’ve thought about it, but currently it’s pushed way to the back of my head and it’s going to stay there for a while 😉

I’m not really done with the English subs – I’m just at a decent point for pausing and sharing what I’ve got so far. I have a fantastic reference for Jedi, so I’m happy there, but I’m not entirely happy with my reference for Star Wars. What this means is that as far as matching fonts go, I feel comfortable improving Jedi indefinitely, but Star Wars is likely to reach a point where the shortcomings in the references make it hard for me to be sure I’m actually making it any better.

I’ve got to start with the reference and work from there. I just briefly looked over at that thread, and it looked pretty interesting, but… the images were useful to some degree, but not actually great, they didn’t include every subtitled line AFAICT, and it wasn’t 100% clear if all the European theatrical releases used this font, or just one, or some. Without something else, it would be a lot more work, for a lot worse results, and possibly just plain wrong for some oddball release that used a different font than the others. Not saying I won’t give it a try at some point, but at the moment I’m happy to sit back and relax a bit 😉

EDIT: Just found the slideshow with all the lines. One of them got cut off a bit at the edges but it doesn’t look bad. Also, lack of an equivalent Jedi reference kinda bugs me about this, and I only really have text/line-break references in Italian.

Oh, excellent, good to know. If you have images of the 35mm frames, I wouldn’t mind seeing them. That way positioning, line breaks, alignment, etc can be figured out. And heck, maybe we can just extract graphical subs like we’ve done for the English prints.

I’d be interested in seeing framegrabs, regardless.

Thanks for posting the fonts Catbus, I just got through using them to create new subtitles streams for my HDTV preservations. They look phenomenal!

Good to hear. There will be further improvements down the road, but they will be more incremental. The biggest change will be that the ROTJ font won’t need to be bolded anymore. It’s a pain trying to make tiny changes on the normal font, to have them magnified when bolded…

EDIT: Argh, and if I knew you just needed the alien subs, I had something way better than the font, at least for the lines shared with the OOT.

Laserschwert said:

Have you thought about tackling the international Greedo subs as well? They used a mixed font based on Gill Sans and Johnston ITC, for which Leonardo created a custom font. I’ve used it in my German DeEd of SW. You can find the discussion starting here in the Italian DeEd thread.

These are my current thoughts on this matter. I took a look at the font and the reference images and I’m going to go ahead and reconstruct alien subtitles for these. However, I’ll be reconstructing only the alien subtitles for which I have references. This means:

• The subtitles will look very much like the theatrical subs, but they won’t be perfect, which would IMO only be possible by extracting images from higher-quality sources than I have access to.
• Although I’ve made some improvements to the Gill Sans-derived font, I won’t really be able to refine it much further without better references.
• I won’t be doing “matching” style subtitles for the rest of the film, like I do with English. I’ve always felt this was a bit of a gimmick, but I’ll include instructions that would allow others to create them if that’s what they want to do. On the upside, these matching subtitles would match perfectly, because they’ll be generated in the exact same manner as the reconstructed alien subs.
• So far, every theatrical reference I’ve seen has varied, at least a little, from the translation in the GOUT. For this reason (and line break issues), I won’t be using the GOUT translations to create reconstructions for the subtitles we don’t have references for, because they’ll more likely than not be wrong. Still, if you think you know what the theatrical translations were, even though you don’t have any reference images, I could probably make an exception. Similar to matching subtitles, if someone wants to do this themselves, all the software, fonts, and settings needed will provided and/or described in detail in the next Project Threepio.

Thinking about the alternate translations issue – if you know that the translation used in, for example, the initial VHS release of Jedi matched our theatrical reference, then it may be a reasonable assumption that the translation in the initial VHS release of Star Wars also matched the theatrical translation, even if the font/appearance didn’t match. Even that assumption could be wrong, of course, but I figure it’s got a better chance of being correct than the GOUT. Line breaks would most likely still need to be guessed, since I doubt they’d match.

CatBus said:

Okay, last thread spam regarding fonts I haven’t even released yet. But seriously, they’re coming.

Great work Catbus! I don’t think anyone regard your posts as thread spam. You’re just keeping an old one alive. I don’t say it just because I’m an old creator of this thread, but I think most people around here appreciate having most of their info in as few threads as possible. Keep it up…

Project Threepio v9.2 is now available, with updated fonts. Major differences are that the Jedi font is now designed to work at a normal weight instead of needing to be bolded, various minor improvements, and new fonts for international prints. At least right now, that means one “international” font for Star Wars which matches an Italian reference print, but may or may not match other international prints, and one “international” font for Jedi, which matches German and Italian references (and it’s more or less the same as the English Star Wars font). The international reference prints even helped improve the English fonts, since the English subtitles exclude certain letters. Thanks to Laserschwert, thxita, and Leonardo for the help with this.

where can i download the font?

My version is included in Project Threepio.

I am looking for the font that is used in TFA for the alien subtitles. I think it is ATF Alternate Gothic bold, or heavy. If anyone has these can you pm me please.