Arial Font <640kb

[cvila]

Hi,
Does anybody have Arial.ttf smaller than 640kb? I have checked my PCs and Macs at work and they are all above that size...
QC sadly rejects it otherwise and client insists on using Arial...
Thanks!

[Carsten]

Do you have access to subtitled IOP DCPs?

[IoannisSyrogiannis]

Using the fonts from an Interop DCP may or may not work, depending on whether the fonts are "compressed", where glyphs will be missing.
More info here: https://dcpomatic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2508
The way towards the compressor from Texas Instruments as well.
Some professional subtitling programs offer that function as well. To the best of my knowledge, Subtitle Edit does not.

[cvila]

Hi I have now resolved the issue, but just as a note of caution I checked 3 or 4 "arial.ttf" from commercial DCPs I received at my work and they all showed several degrees of missing glyphs that I potentilally need at some point. They were certainly "trimmed" for English language.
While my subtitles are mostly in Spanish, I like to keep foreign names (German, Polish, Czech...) in their native form.
Cheers

[Carsten]

Hmm, that's a difficult problem. You may find versions of ARIAL matching your needs, but in the long run, you may simply need to resort to font compressor.

[IoannisSyrogiannis]

It's not exactly „compressing“ or „trimming“, if you will, for English language. The compressor is going through the subtitle file, in order to determine which glyphs are used and which not. Then, it removes the non-used. That is the reason that different reels may have different font file sizes of the same typeface (Arial, for instance).
Therefore, if you make a subtitle file that uses all the glyphs you care for and run a compressor in accordance to that, you may get a compressed font file that would cover your needs without it being full size. Yet, the truth is that the optimal solution would be to apply this sifting of unused glyphs on each individual subtitle file.

There is a program, font-forge that probably can remove glyphs. Also, a python program called pyftsubset.
From what I read (I haven't used it) a command like the following would do the job according to a text file:

Code: Select all

pyftsubset input_font.ttf --text=characters.txt --output-file=subset_font.ttf

That will demand installing "fonttools" on python.

If you figure a way to go, drop a line so we can learn something out of it as well.

Edit: I read that the program ignores whatever is after a #, on the text lines...

[Carsten]

Maybe you can digest your personal Arial with all necessary glyphs by creating a special subtitle file using full glyph sets for the languages you need, then run it through font compressor together with a full ARIAL TTF. Even covering the languages you mentioned, this should still be a small file.

A bit of work, but, you should be able to find the necessary char tables on the internet. Maybe even ChatGPT can create them for you

- Carsten