What have I been doing the last few days? Typesetting Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2. And, um, more typesetting. And... that's nearly it. There's three chapters in the episode and the first one was a horrible pain to typeset. Unlike ep1, where there got to be more and more typesetting as the episode went on, ep2 starts out incredibly thick and gradually thins out.
This lovely little screen shows exactly how much of a pain it can be trying to find space for horizontally written English among vertically written Japanese. Or, rather, it shows how it can sometimes be flat out impossible. Have fun turning your head sideways and squinting at that schedule. I know I did.
I think this screen must take the cake for most subs on screen at once in the entire history of anime. The Japanese text in the background is moving in a spiral pattern around the kanji in the center, which is basically impossible to replicate with soft subs so we get a wall of text instead. On the plus side, they're soft subs so they can be turned off to see the original scene in all its spiral power glory if you really like.
Shots of newspapers, when they actually have real text on them, suck. They suck hard. Not only do they have tons of text, it tends to be crammed together with little or no space to fit in the English translations. And, in this case, it's at a funny angle and curved.
I don't like to do overlays and replace the Japanese text with the English typesetting but there was no other good, no decent, not even a bad place to put the list on the left. (But, again, that's the beauty of soft subs; you can always turn them off.) Getting the overlay to look decent also sucked, by the way. The lines between the text are actually a bunch of em dashes (—) in a row, using the box border setting to fill in all the space between them with black background, clipped to display only in the area of the original list and rotated to get the angle and spacing right. (And that's the simple way to go about it; if you want to use the ASS format's vector drawing features it can get even more complicated.) Then the text was placed in separate subtitles on top of that.
Thankfully most of the typesetting in the second chapter is very easy and there's relatively little in the third. I think there's only two or three scenes left that I'll end up raging at while working on them.
