Good condensed font for subtitles?
 

Hi,

I sometimes use subtitles for my movies, mostly using the .srt-format.
When using 544x576 (528x576) the fonts become about 30% wider on the stand alone with full screen movies. I've tried fonts like Arial Narrow and different condensed fonts, but they all still seem to come out too wide.

Does anyone know of really condensed fonts that won't look to wide on stand alones, but are still good to look at?

You're probably using the subs line in your script before resizing.

-kwag

No, it's one of the last lines of the script.

The problem is quite simple, we encode at 3/4 of the width, so the picture shown on the stand alone is 1/(3/4)=1.33 times wider than the encoded picture.

So if a letter is 12x16 pixels on the encoding, it will show as (equivalent of) 16x16 pixels on the stand alone.

Yes I see, because the subs were extracted from 720x480 :cool:

-kwag

Actually no... :wink:

I extract a text version of the subtitles, making a .srt-file. I can use any font type I like for the subs, so condensed fonts are helping somewhat already.

I was just wondering if there were even more condensed, but readable fonts available, making the still a bit condensed at 1.33 times the width. They would take up fewer space at the same font size, or would make it possible to increase the font size a bit without going from 2 to 3 lines of subtitles. In short: I'd like to emulate the kind of subtitles I'm used to on TV over here.

It is a luxury problem, I was hoping someone had encountered the same problem and solved it over here. Thanks for your help anyway :D

How exactly do you change the font and the font size in the *.srt file? Isn't the *.srt file a simple text file? I would really like to know because I also think the subs gets squashed when encoding in other resolution than VCD (352x240/288). :wink:

I use Vobsub, which contains Submux.exe en Subresync.exe. With Subresync you can open a .srt and use 'Edit' to change things like font, shadows and margins. It produces a .srt.style file, which is automatically recognized by textsub.vdf.

Hope that helps...

Thanks a lot, mate! Will try it a once! :wink: