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

Blazej Lewcio blazej.lewcio at googlemail.com
Wed Feb 29 20:06:18 UTC 2012


2012/2/29 Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com>

> 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.
>

I fully agree and can confirm that so far I never experienced any technical
problems. Of course, appropriate encoding must be selected..

>
> 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.
>
> Makes sense. An independent setting for srt and teletext would probably
make the use of subtitles more intuitive.


> > 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.
>
> User preferences is a hard topic and asking the users is the only way to
find it out. I'm always happy to provide feedback to help you improving the
code. However, looking at other projects may also help. mplayer definitely
centers all the subtitles, and I like this, but I'm wondering what other
people would prefer.

Blazej

> Jim
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