subtitle fonts for Chinese, Korean, or Japanese

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clundy
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jun 20, 2025 2:02 pm

subtitle fonts for Chinese, Korean, or Japanese

Post by clundy »

This is not strictly a DCP-O-Matic question, but thought some folks on here might have some knowledge to share in this regards.

Making some VF supplemental DCPs for subtitles in Asian languages. I'd love to try and use text based DCI XML with font files instead of using PNGs, but finding suitable fonts is not easy. Does anyone have exact font names that they've used successfully for DCPs as timed text for Chinese Simplified and Traditional, as well as Korean, or Japanese?

I have an old copy of Texas Instruments' font compressor tool and I have even tried EZTitles software which has an option to compress a font file.
Both of these would subset the .ttf file down to just the characters needed for the given DCI XML.
But I did a test with NotoSans compressed by EZTitles and found the servers and projectors had trouble with them. They sometimes only displayed 1 line of characters even though there were 2, or some projectors didn't show anything at all.
TI Font Compressor doesn't even like NotoSans and won't work with it, must be too new of a font format for it.

Ultimately I can just do PNG based subtitles, but would appreciate it if anyone has any advice on finding a suitable "compatible" font that I could reasonably use and compress it with these other tools?
Thanks.
Carsten
Posts: 3056
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2014 9:11 pm
Location: Germany

Re: subtitle fonts for Chinese, Korean, or Japanese

Post by Carsten »

I created a subtitled chinese VF a while ago. I think I discussed font issues, but I guess that was on the DCP-o-matic mailing list then. I did find a suitable font then and compressed it with font compressor. It was quite complicated overall, because I had no idea at all about asian/chinese languages and fonts/glyphs.