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Old 2007-09-01, 00:10   Link #1
getfresh
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Fansub typeset styling 101

As I cannot find aya, the owner of the fansubber wiki on irc right this very moment I'll just post this here. This is a basic guide to typeset styling for beginners who find themselves having trouble with creating styles for spoken dialogue.

Fansub typeset styling 101
By: getfresh

Styling the main typeset for a series is the most important part of a typesetters` job. The reason it is the most important is due to the fact that it will be the most consistently seen part of the over all typeset and because it must be absolutely readable.

Part 1: Font selection, 1

When selecting a font the very first thing you must do is watch the anime. When first starting out as a styler, it is best to watch the full episode. This allows you to build a solid “feeling” towards the anime and gain a total concept of what genre it is. Once you are more experienced at genre classifying a series you won’t have to watch nearly as much of it, i.e. I only skim through the episode in vdub while stopping to examine scenes that dominate the over all length of the episode. Once you have an idea of what the anime is about, i.e. comedy, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, moe, hentai, children’s, ecchi, etc…, you should begin looking through your fonts to find ones that fit the “feel” of that genre. Make a list of the names of the fonts you liked and create styles in your ssa/ass script for each one. For now you are done selecting you fonts.

Part 2: Sizing Fonts

When sizing a font you will need to be able to see it rendered on the actual video. Even though there are programs that can load the video and typesets like aegisub, I do not recommend it. I’m not knocking the ability of this program to be useful, it is mainly due to the fact that you will need to encode snip-its of your rendered typesets. You will need to encode these snip-its because when the typesets are encoded the colors will change slightly as will the borders and sharpness. In most cases they become darker and more blurred.
Moving right along, load you video file and your script with the styles into vdub. Make sure you have generic dialogue lines already created and timed to the length of the whole episode. Timing to the whole length just makes your life easier. When making generic lines make them as long as a 2-liner would be in an anime with the same aspect ratio. Now place “;” in from of all dialogue lines except the first one you wish to work on. With all the finished we can begin sizing.
To size you need to consider 3 things, readability, line rapping, and screen coverage. Try get them to the most readable size that raps in only 2 lines while not taking up more that the bottom 1/5 or 1/4 of the over all video. Those are generic ratios of the most extreme sizes you should ever use. Remember smaller is better when it comes to viewable area.
During this time you should also add bolding to “thinner” fonts, and border+shadow because they affect scale readability and coverage as well. When doing borders and shadows you should use 0.5 amounts because they just render better, i.e. 1.5, 2.5, etc… Make sure that the border size fits the fonts “thickness” and don’t go crazy with the shadowing. Shadows should be as unobtrusive as possible only adding to the over all characteristics not becoming one of its own. We are done with sizing now.
Part 3: Color sets

In the first part of this step you must decide just what kind of styles you will have. Some common types are main, collision, thoughts, flashbacks, on-screen, off-screen, radio/TV/phone/speaker, narrator. However many you have will determine how many color sets you will need to make.
To pick your color you will need a hex color grabber. I personally like colormania. Open your color grabber and scroll throughout the episode stopping at areas that have colors which are present throughout the episode. Grab these colors one by one and before copying the hex lighten up the colors till they are very faint. These lighten up colors will be your primary colors. A primary should only hint at the color you wanted since colors with sum and blend once encoded anyways.
Next you will select your border and shadow colors. For borders/shadows there are 2 styles of doing them. First is the highest readability factor in which is everything just black giving highest contrast. Second is using colors that compliment the primary color. When you pick the secondary colors make them as dark as possible while still maintaining their characteristics. This is so they do not blend into the primary to heavily, as well don’t make the text blend into the animation to heavily.
Make quite a few different color sets you like. Next encode these clips of your style selections over 3 or 4 key sections of the episode. Watch your encodes and start narrowing down which sets you truly liked and assign them to which styles they will be used for.

Part 4: Font selection, 2

Now that you have your styling done as far as colors and size are concerned can do you final section. Make videos of style sets for every font you liked. Span these videos over the 3 or 4 key scenes you liked, each font gets its own video. Watch each video and delete the most unreadable or disliked ones. Now if you still have remaining videos you should name each one differently and upload them to your work ftp to let the other staffers on the project help out a bit. You should always get a general consensus from your project team since they will be watching the release as well and should not have to put up with styles they detest. Once all have agreed you are done and free to return to watching porn or playing h-games or whatever >.>

Peace-em out~
getfresh
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Old 2007-09-01, 13:09   Link #2
Unearthly
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I have one question that I've never been able to figure out.

Just where do Typesetters get all of their fonts? Are there large font packs out there that you can download? Or did you just hunt around for a bunch of different styled fonts until you were satisfied with your repertoire?
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Old 2007-09-01, 13:26   Link #3
Zanejin
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Adobe makes very good fonts and releases them in huge packages that are for purchase. Quality free fonts can be found on dafont.
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Old 2007-09-01, 14:10   Link #4
getfresh
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Zanejin View Post
Adobe makes very good fonts and releases them in huge packages that are for purchase. Quality free fonts can be found on dafont.
Adobe fonts don't load in textsub as far as I have ever seen, only TTF, OTF. And theres many free font sites as well as alt.binaries.fonts on newsgroups. When you collect fonts do not install them until you need to use them. The more fonts you have install, the slower your system will be.
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Old 2007-09-01, 14:42   Link #5
ArchMageZeratuL
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A few points that I'd like to make:

1. When selecting fonts, there are some important considerations to be made. The most important of all is whether the font is Serif or Sans Serif. Most people consider that using Serif fonts for subtitles is unpleasant, so you might want to avoid those. There are exceptions that work well, however.

2. Also, some shows require extended characters to be used, e.g. if the characters have foreign names. Many fonts do not support those. Check it up in advance to avoid nasty surprises. If worse comes to worst, get a font editor and modify the font to include what you need.

3. The size of the border is up to personal taste, of course. Also, many people prefer subtitles without any shadow, as they do not increase the readability in any way. However, since you mentioned encoding... if you ARE hardsubing, then do yourself a favour and use \be1 on all your lines. This will greatly reduce the ringing around the subtitles, and will lower the bitrate hit that your file will take from having hardsubs. If having a smaller file is critical, use softsubs.

4. For colours, remember to differentiate primary from outline by luminance, and not just by hue (if you want to use a different hue at all). This is because there are many different types of colour blindness, and if you happen to hit a combination that someone can't distinguish, the lines will suddenly become almost impossible to read (Try it yourself - set both the primary and outline colours to the same and see how much worse it suddenly gets).

5. For the location of the subtitles box, there are two major considerations - overscan and ease of read. If you are making your subtitles with the intention of letting people watch them on a TV, you'll have to make the margins somewhat wider so that the lines don't get cut. You'll also have to make the font bigger. If you don't want the subtitles spanning all the horizontal length, as getfresh mentioned, the easiest way to do that is to set the left and right margins for the style to a large (50 or so) value. If you have to do a letterboxed release (i.e. opening is fullscreen, ep is widescreen), then do not place the subtitles entirely on the letterbox - that way, the eye can ignore that part and suffer less stress from moving up and down.

Aegisub 2.00 has an "overscan mask" feature to help with the overscan considerations. It's also planned to add a "TV mode" simulator effect, so you can see how much harder it is to read on a SDTV. If there's any demand for it, a "compression artifacts" effect might also be possible, so you can preview the encoding artifacts generated.
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Old 2007-09-01, 22:18   Link #6
msr
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Thanks for this documentation. I'm still learning and this contained some usefull information
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Old 2007-09-01, 22:25   Link #7
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I'm going to start encoding a second subtitle track for watching on TVs as a second monitor. I should increase the outline size to three? and the font to 35 points or is higher better? Also, is raising the default position of the subtitles a good idea?
Most of the DVD's wtih subtitles I have use green or yellow font colors. Is white bad for watching on a TV?
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Old 2007-09-03, 07:05   Link #8
cyth
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I have a question for the great styling minds. I'm not sure how much does having your system set to Japanese locale contribute to this matter (since I never bothered checking it out on default), but do you guys know of a good font browsing program that can read information and temporarily load old Japanese fonts (like the DF*, DC*, HG* .ttc series) on such a system config?

Font browsing programs I've tried either can't easily preview not-installed fonts, or they can't load them temporarily, or they can't display their information (like font type-face name) in case of old Japanese fonts.
Is there a program that has these features combined, or perhaps a combination of two programs that complement each other well?
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Old 2007-09-03, 09:50   Link #9
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My general suggestion for choosing subtitle fonts:

1. Make sure all lines in the text are relatively heavy. Not just the vertical lines or such, but all lines. It makes things easier to read.
2. "Holes" in the text shapes shouldn't be too small, eg. the shape of the small letter "e" should have reasonably large space on both sides of the middle horizontal line, that makes it easier to read. This gives more space for the outline colour to show through.
3. Go for a large, but not too large, "x" size, that is, the height of the small letter "x" as compared to the size of capital letter "I".

The reason many serif fonts are bad for subtitles is that they fail on my point number 1.
(Serif: Fonts like Times New Roman, the small "hands and feet" where vertical lines end are called serifs. Sans-serif: Fonts like Verdana, that have no serifs. Also note how Times New Roman has a very low "x" height while Verdana has a large "x" height.)
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Old 2007-09-03, 12:20   Link #10
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isn't that what \fscx and \fscy for?
and new fonts in vista (or office 2007) look good
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Old 2007-09-03, 12:23   Link #11
ArchMageZeratuL
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\fsc tags can only do it to a certain degree... They don't actually make the strokes bolder.
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Old 2007-09-03, 13:32   Link #12
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Toua: You can temporarily make the font available in the system by opening it (just double click it).
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Old 2007-09-04, 13:06   Link #13
pichu
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Unearthly View Post
I have one question that I've never been able to figure out.

Just where do Typesetters get all of their fonts? Are there large font packs out there that you can download? Or did you just hunt around for a bunch of different styled fonts until you were satisfied with your repertoire?
Also, try using font editing programs like fontlab to improve the readability and scalability of the font you choose. I use those often to make thin fonts into thick fonts, make fonts narrower with the same weights around (i.e. \fscx70 will make the font thinner horizontally), modify ugly glyphs, and so forth. An example is my custom font weight for Adobe Mercurius CT font (which I think would be appropriate for that series as I wanted a casual sans font) in Conclave's School Days -- that's between the Light (which I thickened from) and Medium (too thick) weight.

Other than that, I totally agree with your stylings.

Maybe someone should mention what kind of typefaces are preferred for the anime genre?

Here are my preferences: (always pick readability as number one priority)

Cute/Loli shows: Handwritten. (e.g.: Dom Casual)
School Anime: Casual Sans (Mercurius as I pointed out)
Mecha: Octal/Hex Sans (Digital Regular)
Fantasy: Hybrid Sans/Serif font

Never Use:
Scriptive Fonts (i.e., Vldaimir Script)
Italics as the main font
Irregular Fonts (i.e., Viner Hand ITC - okay I just picked one randomly heh - or Old English Text)

Last edited by pichu; 2007-09-04 at 23:17.
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Old 2007-09-04, 22:28   Link #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pichus View Post
Also, try using font editing programs like fontlab to improve the readability and scalability of the font you choose. I use those often to make thin fonts into thick fonts, make fonts narrower with the same weights around (i.e. \fscx70 will make the font thinner horizontally), modify ugly glyphs, and so forth. An example is my custom font weight for Adobe Mercurius CT font (which I think would be appropriate for that series as I wanted a casual sans font) in Conclave's School Days -- that's between the Light (which I thickened from) and Medium (too thick) weight.
Dude, read the title of the thread again... typeset styling 101. I think you just stepped over to the intermediate level material right there! I think there are many typesetters out there who has never touched a font editor.
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Old 2007-09-04, 22:48   Link #15
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Originally Posted by Sylf View Post
Dude, read the title of the thread again... typeset styling 101. I think you just stepped over to the intermediate level material right there! I think there are many typesetters out there who has never touched a font editor.
LOL well put sylf. Yes everyone please don't "leet" this thread. Keep it beginners level. That was it's intended purpose. By the time you start editing fonts, and getting into chained overrides beyond standard ones you should already know how to style and have your own method. Thus a styling guild is pointless at that point.

If you have some pointers to share about mistakes you made and what you learned from them in the styling dept. sure share away.
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Old 2007-09-04, 23:00   Link #16
pichu
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First of all, using a font editor to edit fonts for styling and typesetting when you have a limited set of fonts like myself should always be considered as a beginner-level, as someone here asked about where to get them from... And adding a "Faux Bold" to the font isn't that difficult or Faux Italics. (by default, .ass uses 15° for faux italics but I prefer like 9 or 10°) People don't know that because they were never shown in 101 course? In FontLab and some other freeware (I forgot the names), there are effects available that you don't even need to edit the font... You just apply the transformation to the glyphs and it will do the job for you. And save it -- how much more advanced is that?

If you don't have the font, make it!

There are times it takes quicker time to make a font than searching for a font. Hence, why it should be "101" -_-;

Font stands about 75% of the styling... That's why it's very crucial in styling.

Bah, I edited that post to include the quote... As you can see, I hardly use the forums and don't remind me why I hate forums... That statement is just a reply to him.

Last edited by pichu; 2007-09-04 at 23:22.
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Old 2007-09-04, 23:04   Link #17
getfresh
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No. That is advanced. If someone doesn't know the basics of styling a font for dialog speech, it is a 90% chance they are in ownership of all the tools required for glyph editing. And I don't know how often you have to "create" fonts for dialog, but I have never had too. Theres tons of really well made fonts already out there that have complete charsets. The only time I have ever made fonts if for signs, or for FX which have nothing to do with dialog styling.
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Old 2007-09-04, 23:28   Link #18
pichu
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Anyone knows that ... most fonts aren't suitable for subtitling. If you need to reply, why don't you reply something pertinent to the topic. Like I pointed out, it's just a reply to one of the questions here.

Aside from the topic,

Never pick `pure` (100% saturation or close) red colors or orange colors in styling for "Hardsub text" in "YV12 video" due to the fact that YV12 misinterprets red colorings. Don't know any of those terms? Google it.

Also, I tried to avoid using red or green text because I noticed some people are color-blinded, and they'll have a hard time differentiating the subs.

And Adobe Type-1 fonts load just fine in vsfilter -_- It just won't work in softsub mkv as attachments failed miserably.
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Old 2007-09-05, 00:00   Link #19
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Originally Posted by pichus View Post
Anyone knows that ... most fonts aren't suitable for subtitling. If you need to reply, why don't you reply something pertinent to the topic. Like I pointed out, it's just a reply to one of the questions here.
I never had a single problem finding a good dialogue font or sign font from my own collection, but I had years to accumulate it and my mom has been into digital editing and publishing for many many years, so I had a slight advantage being able to pick from over 50,000 fonts

Creating your own fonts using font imaging software isn't a newb styling intro topic really but the option does exist for the bold who don't mind a lot of failure and time. As for why you'd want to do that for a dialogue font, I have no idea.
Most people would generally save that kind of effort for something that needs to match signwork or for text effects that need something special that you don't have in your font collection currently.

Quote:
Never pick `pure` (100% saturation or close) red colors or orange colors in styling for "Hardsub text" in "YV12 video" due to the fact that YV12 misinterprets red colorings. Don't know any of those terms? Google it.

Also, I tried to avoid using red or green text because I noticed some people are color-blinded, and they'll have a hard time differentiating the subs.
It was already stated simply that you should NOT use highly contrasting colors as they look... just freaking awful to the rest of us, not just for color-blindeded people. Light shades of the colors are fine, but once you start cross-mixing funny colors and using full shades of some of them they start mixing on the screen and looking just fart-tastic. It's to save the eyes of everyone with easily legible stuff.

Personally, that means not using those offscreen fonts, maybe using a darker shade for two people talking over each other so you know which one is interrupting.


Quote:
And Adobe Type-1 fonts load just fine in vsfilter -_- It just won't work in softsub mkv as attachments failed miserably.
Using them in "textsub" is well-out if things haven't changed since I used it last.

Adobe uses a different format for their fonts, so that's going to be expected when you have to take a lot of extra steps and licensing costs to get Adobe's stuff to read legitimately.

Last edited by salkaman; 2007-09-05 at 00:02. Reason: Left out something
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Old 2007-09-05, 00:01   Link #20
getfresh
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pichus View Post
Anyone knows that ... most fonts aren't suitable for subtitling. If you need to reply, why don't you reply something pertinent to the topic. Like I pointed out, it's just a reply to one of the questions here.

Aside from the topic,

Never pick `pure` (100% saturation or close) red colors or orange colors in styling for "Hardsub text" in "YV12 video" due to the fact that YV12 misinterprets red colorings. Don't know any of those terms? Google it.

Also, I tried to avoid using red or green text because I noticed some people are color-blinded, and they'll have a hard time differentiating the subs.

And Adobe Type-1 fonts load just fine in vsfilter -_- It just won't work in softsub mkv as attachments failed miserably.

Dude... I have over 1000 fonts that are suitable for dialogue. If you need more than that you are just trying way too hard to have an original unused font... And I believe I covered contrasting colors of primary being very bright just hinting what tone you want and the border being very dark just hinting at a tone, so it would be impossible to get pure greens or reds or oranges... ArchMageZeratuL also spoke on the lum. factor. Please read what has already been posted...
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