[mythtv] Commit #25fe66 "Subtitles: Remove the OSDSubFont setting."

Jim Stichnoth stichnot at gmail.com
Wed Feb 29 18:02:08 UTC 2012


On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 12:03 AM, Blazej Lewcio
<blazej.lewcio at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was using FreeSans. Now, I also set it back in the code for my frontend.
>
> In my opinion the default font (FreeMono) makes the subtitles excessively
> wide. The letter spacing is unnecessary large.
> Also the letters are very thin, which is an issue if there is a certain
> viewing distance.
>
> There is a lot of threads out there about selecting a good font, but with
> FreeSans I get nice result that is similar to what other players do by
> default.

So far the reasons given are related to aesthetics and preferences
(which is quite valid).  I would also like to know if anyone has
experienced technical problems with any subtitle fonts, such as
particular characters not rendering properly especially in non-English
language subtitles.

The issue motivating this change is that the default value for
OSDSubFont has always (or at least for a long time) been FreeSans, and
in general proportional-spaced fonts are not appropriate for CEA-608
and teletext.  Simply changing the default to FreeMono doesn't solve
the problem that anyone who has gone through the OSD Settings page
probably has the FreeSans value configured in the database.  The
current thinking is to bring back the user setting but under a
different name, effectively resetting it to FreeMono.  People who
prefer a different font just need to visit OSD Settings and they'll be
back in business.  Before making such a code change, though, it's
important to be aware of any non-aesthetic issues with the fonts.

> If I may add one more comment. Long text lines that are split in two OSD
> lines are not centered, which seems to be strange for me, but this might be
> a matter of taste :-)

I was wondering if anyone would notice that.  If you look carefully at
text captions (e.g. from .srt files), you'll see that all caption
lines (including long lines that are split) are left-justified, and
the bounding box is centered at the bottom of the screen.  This allows
some existing CEA-708 layout code to be leveraged.  Actually, I think
the long-line splitting looks clumsy, even when the split part is
centered, and I welcome suggestions on how to improve it.  One idea is
to prepend the split part to the following line, but that wouldn't be
good if dialog from different characters is meant to be on separate
lines.  Another idea is to add a blank line after a split line, if
space allows.

Jim


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