Best (plain) font & size for subbing?

[Branduil]

Just avoid fonts which are frilly or cursive. Also, never make the interior font color darker than the border, it looks awful.

[Billkwando]

Originally Posted by Branduil

Just avoid fonts which are frilly or cursive. Also, never make the interior font color darker than the border, it looks awful.

Agreed. You are on my wavelength.


OT but, while I'm in the process of making an ass of myself, does anyone here speak Japanese? I need a short phrase translated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZkYFRXEtU

18 seconds in, after "Heeeeeeeey!".

It's the only instance of spoken Japanese in the entire video. (I'm lucky there are pieces of it all over YouTube I can reference....for cases like this)

In my script I just have "*Japanese*".

[Arm]

Originally Posted by Billkwando

Agreed. You are on my wavelength.


OT but, while I'm in the process of making an ass of myself, does anyone here speak Japanese? I need a short phrase translated:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWZkYFRXEtU

18 seconds in, after "Heeeeeeeey!".

It's the only instance of spoken Japanese in the entire video. (I'm lucky there are pieces of it all over YouTube I can reference....for cases like this)

In my script I just have "*Japanese*".

There's actually quite a bit of Japanese in the video...

According to the lyrics, at 19 seconds, he says, "Come and dance with me."

[Billkwando]

Originally Posted by Arm

There's actually quite a bit of Japanese in the video...

According to the lyrics, at 19 seconds, he says, "Come and dance with me."

LOL. I said "spoken" japanese. I have the lyrics, but I had doubts about what I was hearing. So he's saying "Come and dance with me"? (cos the audience sings it right after).

I know there are official translations of the songs that came from Tofu Records (I just have to find them), so I didn't want to impose on anyone to translate anything but the spoken part. It sounded like "minnasukaze" to me, but again, I don't speak Japanese. I didn't think Hyde's english was that bad.

Though I did originally think he was saying "Come and dance with me" I started to doubt myself and I didn't wanna get flamed by the first Japanese speaker who saw my sub.

Second opinions anyone?

EDIT: It would appear, after weeks of asking random people, that he is saying "Mina ikuze" which apparently means "Everybody, let's go"

2nd opinions are still welcome (other than reading the lyric sheet to me of course)

[leetdood]

For fansubs, try some of eclipse's releases. Their site is http://eclipse.no-sekai.de/

[Billkwando]

Originally Posted by leetdood

For fansubs, try some of eclipse's releases. Their site is http://eclipse.no-sekai.de/

Thank you for the link!

I will go check some out now.

I really appreciate everyone's input and help on this. You guys have been very patient and accepting of someone who just fell off the turnip wagon.

I've heard it thrown around that trying to learn on your own is discouraged and that you'd generally incur ridicule and scorn, but I haven't found that to be the case at all here. Nobody's flamed me or been anything less than awesome, between you guys and jfs at the aegisub forum. Heck, I haven't even been scolded by a mod, told to "use the 'search' function", lurk moar, or "RTFM" even once.

Granted, I've tried to research on my own (to an extent), and be clear and grammticaliciously correct with my questions........but I just wanted to say thanks again, and you guys are awesome.

[Ichihara Asako]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

I like color coding in fonts. The first time I noticed it was in Junni Kokki, where the texts from off-screen speakers were in a different color than those for people on screen. But the best use of color coding I've seen was Shintani's subs of Hidamari Sketch. The four lead girls have different hair colors, and Shintani matched those colors in their fonts. Very cute.

Wow, the first time I've ever disagreed with SeijiSensei on anything. :O

Anyway. I dislike the character based colours. On/offscreen, or thoughts is fine. (I like italicised thoughts, personally. Maybe a slightly off colour to main dialogue) But based on char hair/eye/clothing/whatever colour is annoying.

Not only is it distracting, it's a pain to typeset, worse to QC, and as a viewer, you really notice when the colours aren't set right for a char, which in turn leads people to complain about the QC, the QCs bitch at the typesetters, and so on. It's just not a very good practice unless you have a really solid QC team that goes over it several times to make sure everybody is set correctly. But that in turn is a waste of time, which equates to slower subs, and complaining viewers...

I speak primarily as a viewer these days since I left the scene a while ago, but I used to typeset and QC more than anything else, so it's kind of a sore point with me. >.<

[Jimmy C]

Would this be the right place to ask?
I'm looking for a good font to use as defaults in subtitling. I'm looking for fonts that are pleasant to look at while being easily readable. Most importantly, it should be impossible to confuse one character for another. I do not want viewers to go, "was that a 'u' or an 'a' just now?"

Any reccomendations for fonts that looks good and meets the following requirements:
Has thick lines and uniform thickness for all lines of the character. Unlike Times New Roman, for example.
Uppercase "i" and lowercase "L" do not look alike.
Preferably has rounded ends. Square ends like on Tahoma look harsh to me.

I started with Tahoma, but moved on to Trebuchet. Along the way, I found Lexia that almost fit my needs, but not enough. I would be most grateful for any advice.

[lamer_de]

In general, sans serif fonts (like Arial) are preferrable to serif ones (like Times New Roman) for short texts, as they look cleaner (and in subtitles you only have 1-3 lines of text on the screen, which counts as short). A good starting point is always dafont or any other free font site that allows you to preview fonts with a custom text: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=...t=Il+Theatrino

Qlassik on the first page fits the criteria Jimmy C needs, for example (but I'm sure there are more).

[Jimmy C]

lamer de, thanks for reminding me about dafont. I haven't been there in years. I checked out your link, Qlassik is not much better than Trebuchet I'd have to say. None of the others seem outstanding either.
If anyone knows where I can find something like Tahoma with rounded ends, that'd be great. Or Arial Rounded with dashed uppercase "i".

[Hyrrokkin]

I (my group) uses Qlassik for all of our subs and there have been no problems with it.

We used to use Calibri but got comments that it was too plain -.-; But that's to be expected, I guess, since the anime is all out of the ordinary. =)

I reccommend Qlassik though. Personally I use Qlassik Bold because I found the default one to be so much smaller, somewhy. I have a feeling that it isn't though, when I use italic text...

The size I use is 36pt on 704x396 and 640x480 for the normal text and 32pt for comments/notes.

[Billkwando]

Originally Posted by Hyrrokkin

We used to use Calibri but got comments that it was too plain -.-; But that's to be expected, I guess, since the anime is all out of the ordinary. =)

Oooh, "too plain"........I like the sound of that.

Will definitely be trying that this weekend when I get back to the subbing.

On personal note, my wife told me last night that she ordered Hyde's Faith Live DVD for me for Valentine's Day, so it looks like I'll be looking into Maestro for reburning it with my subs (and my region code) very soon!

/excited

[Billkwando]

If anybody else needs Calibri and doesn't have it, you can get it for free if you download the Office 2007 compatibility pack:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

[Maceart]

I prefer Tahoma or Trebuchet MS. Both fonts are found natively in Windows, so no need to mux them in for softsubs. They're also nice on the eyes.

As for font sizes, for 640 x 480 I like 36 size font. That's what we used for Doremi-fansubs' Mnemosyne subs. (Tahoma 36 for episode, Trebuchet 36 for title fonts.)

[edogawaconan]

Originally Posted by Maceart

I prefer Tahoma or Trebuchet MS. Both fonts are found natively in Windows, so no need to mux them in for softsubs. They're also nice on the eyes.

...but not available natively in Linux or OS X (or *BSD or Haiku or Solaris or <insert os name here>)...

[Doughnuts]

I quite like Gentium. It kinda resembles Georgia, but is slightly smaller at the same point size. It meets all the criteria above (I, l are different, round-ish edges etc) and is available for other OSs.

[False Dawn]

Originally Posted by Maceart

I prefer Tahoma or Trebuchet MS. Both fonts are found natively in Windows, so no need to mux them in for softsubs. They're also nice on the eyes.

Why wouldn't you want to mux in the font for the softsubs? It's not like it takes a lot of room or time to do it

[pichu]

You can always make use of the fonts developed by Microsoft Research. ;p

Tahoma/Verdana are fonts optimized for websites. Note: Verdana is the same as Tahoma with wider spacing.

Calibri is the font optimized for Microsoft ClearType(TM) font antialiasing.

Segoe UI is the default Vista font; it's optimized for font antialiasing schemes.

Add BOLD to them to make them stand out in subtitles.

---

As for sizes, I recommend using about 1:12 ratio of the assa font size to the vertical pixels in the script resolution. It really depends. Some fonts are closer to each other (i.e. less vertical margins, take Kanji fonts like DFPHSGothic-W7 as they are closer to each other), so that they require smaller sizes. Others are more separated vertically (i.e., Calibri)... they require bigger font sizes.

For example, 640X480 video should use 40pt font (480/12), 704X400 should use 32pt font (400/12), and 1280X720 should use 60pt font (720/12).

[getfresh]

Originally Posted by Billkwando

I wanted to ask what the best (or most standard DVD-like) font was, and how big it should be for watching on TV?

Aegisub seems to output 20pt natively. I tried just doing Arial bold 30pt, but my wife thinks it looks a little big. It seemed pretty normal to me, but somewhat "off". Maybe the bold is what did it.

I don't want anything showy or expressive, just a simple san serif font that I can find on my PC (or for free).

I also saw some article from a site (in the UK maybe) going absolutely "Font Nazi" about how you shouldn't use Arial because it's a "Windows Font" and how it will make you a laughing stock of the fansubbing world. Exaggeration?


PS Bonus question. Would it be too busy to have english translated lines at the bottom and green romanji one line above it? You know, for the folks who wanna sing along at home. That's also one reason I'm concerned about font size as well (subbing a live concert......gonna do both hard and softsub versions, plus hopefully a Maestro'd script for the DVD owners.........was gonna do the eng/romanji for the hardsub and multiple versions for the soft/dvd)

The default style in ssa is designed to be the easiest to read imho. If all you care about is subbing just use the Arial present. If you wish to get into design and such and make your release stand apart then go for an optional style setting. Some general rules of thumb are as follows.

Don't pick fonts that are busy or curvy.

Use contrasting colors but nothing that people with minor color blindness may have issues making out.

For primary colors select colors from the anime which are represented often throughout the anime and lighten the color up quite a bit. I lighten my primary color so that the darkest value falls in the "D0" and under hex range.

For borders you can use the same method as your primary selection but instead darken them quite a bit. I normally darken my border so that the brightest value falls in the "2F" and under hex range.

When selecting a border you try to balance the border to compliment the font weight so that the subtitle does not stick out in your face but is easily separated from the existing animation.

Shadows, if used, use this type of balancing as well.

Font sizing deals with how they render at certain values. Try to select a size that is not overly hogging the screen while it still renders smoothly.

[Jimmy C]

Originally Posted by Doughnuts

I quite like Gentium. It meets all the criteria above (I, l are different, round-ish edges etc) and is available for other OSs.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm looking for a sans serif font. Gentium and its family appear to be serif fonts.