When you animate the \fs tag you're changing the actual font size requested of the font subsystem, and this also affects the hinting applied to the text. If you've ever needed to have some text change size on screen in ASS subtitles you might have considered whether you should use \t(\fs) or \t(\fscx\fscy). It's this change of glyph shapes that's interesting in subtitle context. The smaller the text size, the more drastic the change. Windows and Macintosh OS X render quite differently) but at least if you're on Windows you should be able to see that the shapes of the letters actually change a bit. For example, here's some text in Verdana at different sizes:ĭepending on your font rendering system it might look different (eg. The bigger the point size, the less strong the hinting needs to be. So what does that have to do with subtitles? Well, the amount of hinting applied to a glyph depends on the point size of it. The basic idea in font hinting is to snap the outlines to the edges of pixels, such that stems and vertical lines take up a whole number of pixels instead of disappearing in quantisation or become a smudge of sub-pixel noise. It's a technique for intelligently modifying the outlines of characters so they look better without completely losing the characteristics that makes the font face special.
![aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear](https://www.authot.com/wordpress.new/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/test-AE-300x169.png)
![aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nqF7PZLankY/UyGwgyScReI/AAAAAAAAATE/UnYIIIi9EhA/s1600/2014-03-13_120844.png)
Usually glyphs ("characters") in outline fonts have quite some detail in them, but if you only have 7x13 pixels to render a character in, you're going to have a hard time fitting all that detail in, even if you use sub-pixel rendering such as anti-aliasing and ClearType.
Aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear tv#
(Actually CRT TV screens are even worse.)
![aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear aegisub subtitle outlinecolor disappear](http://images.clipartpanda.com/distance-clipart-4663985-straight-road-disappearing-into-distance.jpg)
or why you should not use animation on the \fs override tag.ĭo you know what font hinting is? If you haven't worked with digital typography you might not, but it's a technique used by (almost) all font rendering systems to make vector fonts (such as True Type, Open Type and Adobe Type 1) appear better on low-resolution mediums like computer monitors.