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Don't use \fad on fades to black

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:01:00 +0000

Dear typesetters,

I have seen this countless times. Every time, it has bothered me. Please, don’t do it anymore.

When the screen fades to black (or white, or any other solid colour, for that matter), DON’T use the \fad tag to fade the text along with it. When you use \fad, you’re making the text translucent, and not darker. The result is that it will blend with the background - including all the usual associated bugs if you have borders and shadows - and get somewhat darker because the background itself is getting darker - it just won’t get as dark as it SHOULD be, and the visual effect is that the text is getting brighter, relative to the background.

If programming languages were religions: the aftermath

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 03:37:00 +0000

Until December 15 2008, aegisub.net would typically get ~350 hits per day. Between December 16 and 19, it got a total of 266 thousand hits, thanks to the “If programming languages were religions…” post. So, first of all: Thanks, everybody! All feedback, positive and negative, was greatly appreciated.

First it was put on Digg. Then on reddit. Then, to my great surprise, on Slashdot… and on slashdot.jp. Stumbleupon. And even on one of my favourite blogs, Pharyngula. It was linked on many IRC channels and blogs around the Internet… Several of my friends wrote to tell me that they had seen it linked in some internal forum or mail list. I never expected this kind of reaction!

If programming languages were religions...

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:52:00 +0000

And now, for some off-topic:

“If programming languages were religions” (Inspired by “If programming languages were cars”)

C would be Judaism - it’s old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can’t convert into it - you’re either into it from the start, or you will think that it’s insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.

Aegisub 2.1.6 released

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:31:00 +0000

Ooooooooops.

Apparently the fix on 2.1.5 caused audio selection to become much slower. This release will hopefully fix all of those issues. Since this is a very minor change, you can download a RAR with only the new executable (plus its pdb) and extract it over the 2.1.5 install (typically “C:\Program Files\Aegisub”). The RAR “patch” is available here. [Exias’ mirror]

If you want to download the complete 2.1.6 installer, you can download it here. [Exias’ mirror]

Aegisub 2.1.5 released

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:44:00 +0000

Due to a fairly serious bug introduced in 2.1.4, here’s 2.1.5. Everyone is advised to update to it.

Fixed a bug in audio display that caused it not to update properly (introduced on 2.1.4)
Fixed a bug that caused Aegisub to crash if you attempted to load any ASS subtitles with malformed embedded fonts
Tweaked the layout of the visual typesetting bar

The win32 binary is available here.

BTW, a good way to keep up with Aegisub updates it to subscribe to the Atom feed - I recommend Google Reader.

Aegisub 2.1.4 Released

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:46:00 +0000

Version 2.1.4 is now out for Windows. The highlights are:

Hopefully removed the dependency on Visual C++ 2005 SP1 runtimes
Greatly improved the draw speed of audio display (should make committing on spectrum mode much faster, depending on your settings) - please let me know if any instabilities are caused by this
Fixed the aspect ratio of video when the audio display is too tall
Added Hungarian translation
Fixed a styling glitch in the fonts collector and translation assistant
Made Aegisub capable of running if ffms2.dll isn’t found

It can be downloaded HERE.

Three things that Java could learn from C++

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 16:03:00 +0000

This is a mostly off-topic rant that is being posted because I know that a good portion of our user base is composed of programmers.

Ever since I started working with Java, a few months ago, there have been many things that I have felt SHOULD be there, but aren’t. Three, in particular, have always bothered me: stack building, operator overloading, and const-correctness. For the rest of this post, I will write snippets in both C++ and in Java to illustrate the differences.

Aegisub 2.1.3a Released

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:54:00 +0000

Yes, it took a while, but here’s a new release preview build. The biggest changes from 2.1.2 are:

FFmpegSource2 is the new default audio and video provider, replacing Avisynth. This should provide frame-exact seeking (with keyframe support) on AVI, MKV and MP4 files, as well as other benefits. This is still a bit experimental, however. If you have any issues, just switch back to Avisynth in options.
~~The DirectSound audio player was reverted to what it was in 2.1.1, since 2.1.2 seems to have critical issues related to it.~~ [Edit: jfs says that the issue was after 2.1.2]
Many small issues around the program were fixed.
VSFilter has been updated to the MPC-HC 2.39 version, which includes jfs’s new patches (see this post)
Aegisub is now built against Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtimes. Hopefully there will be no issues related to this (ASSDraw is still built against 2005 SP1 runtimes, due to library issues). If you can’t run Aegisub, try installing this and reporting how it goes.

A listing of other fixes can be found on TheFluff’s builds page. This release includes the Brazilian Portuguese (100%), Catalan (99%) and Spanish (99%) translations. All other translations are too outdated, and were left out. If you are willing to update any of them, please let us know.

Two Firefox extensions that you'll want

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:19:00 +0100

If you do any sort of Japanese reading on the Internet, you’ll want these two Firefox extensions:

XHTML Ruby Support Furigana Injector

The first one adds proper ruby (a.k.a. furigana, in the case of Japanese) support to Firefox. The second one is more interesting: it adds furigana to kanji on websites that don’t have it, making it much easier to read Japanese text.

An interesting side-effect of having proper ruby support in Firefox is that the times in blogger look quite odd, with the full date above them.

Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2 - In a Nutshell

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:57:00 +0100

I have noticed that lots of people have no idea what exactly is the whole “Unicode”, “UTF-8”, “UTF-16” and “UCS-2” stuff, aside from the fact that it’s somehow related to the display of foreign characters. The objective of this post is to briefly explain them and dispel some of the myths associated with them.

Unicode is a coding system used to represent characters from many languages (including Japanese and Chinese) without the need to change your language locale. If you’ve tried writing Kanji in Medusa, you know what I’m talking about. In Unicode, characters are given an unique number. For example, the capital letter “A” is U+0041 (65 in decimal), and the Hiragana “ふ” is U+3075 (12405 in decimal). Characters are divided into planes of 65536 characters for convenience. Almost all common characters are in plane 0 (also known as the Basic Multilingual Plane, or BMP), which goes from code points U+0000 to U+FFFF. All kanji are in planes 0 and 2.

Kanamemo on Linux

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:04:00 +0100

Tomman has figured out how to build Kanamemo on Linux… So, in case you’re interested:

http://tomman.monkeeh.com/temp/linux_build_instruc.txt

Kanjimemo brainstorming and input request

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:48:00 +0100

漢字メモ？

[Text above added to try to attract some attention to this post]

Ever since I’ve posted about Kanamemo, there have been quite a few requests for a “Kanjimemo”, a tool based on the same idea, but for Kanji.

Even before, I had considered writing something like that… But I never started because I couldn’t quite figure out all the details on how it’d work. On this post, I’ll talk about some of the ideas that I had for it. If you’re interested in a “Kanjimemo”, please leave your feedback and suggestions in the comments!

TrayDict: EDICT on your systray

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:29:00 +0100

A while ago, I posted about Kanamemo, a tool that I made to help me learn Hiragana and Katakana. Another tool that I’ve made to help me in the learning of the Japanese language was TrayDict:

TrayDict is a very simple application that sits on your systray until you bring it up with WinKey+Z. Then it lets you type a word in Kanji, Kana, Rōmaji or English, and it will search for it in EDICT (or any of the other supported dictionaries), returning every match, ordered by relevance. The catch is: it’s a complete hack. I made it in just a few days, without worrying at all about how well it’d work - I just wanted a tool for personal use. Even though I’m posting the link to it here, here are some things that you’ll have to keep in mind:

The epic of Aegisub-tan

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:47:00 +0100

A while ago, jfs and I thought that it would be interesting to have a mascot for Aegisub, similar to the OS-tans from Futaba. She would be a chibi-style mascot, wearing light plate armor and holding a staff, and she would be seen in places like the splash screen, or in “loading” and “Aegisub crashed” dialogs, with different expressions to show her “mood” (e.g. crying when Aegisub crashes).

So we tried to contact several different artists, and many of them seemed to be quite interested in drawing at least a concept for her - but all of them eventually gave up. Is there any hope for an Aegisub-tan?

Kanamemo: a tool for the apprentice weeaboo

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:24:00 +0100

Back in 2006, when I decided to learn Hiragana and Katakana, I looked around for flashcard programs to help me in my task. After finding that none of them actually worked as I thought that they SHOULD, I decided to roll my own. The result is Kanamemo:

It works by teaching you Hiragana and/or Katakana (at your choice) by “levels”. Each level typically contains 5 different kana. It basically shows you a kana and asks you to enter its Hepburn roomaji transliteration. If you get it right, you get +1 point in it. If you get it wrong, you get -10 to it AND -10 to the one that you confused it with. Once all kana of a given level are at least at level 5 (or so, I don’t remember the exact rules), you’ve learned them and it unlocks the next level.

Five cool things in Aegisub that people aren't aware of

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:25:00 +0100

One thing that I’ve noticed while talking to users of Aegisub is that there are a number of features that people just don’t realize Aegisub has. Here are five of them:

(Note: these tips apply to version 2.1.2.)

Loading audio from a video file If you have a video raw that you’re working on, and you’re just going to be performing audio timing on it, you don’t need to demux the audio from it. Provided that the video is in a format that Aegisub can work with (that is: most files on Windows), you can just go to Audio->Open File and pick the VIDEO file as the audio file to open (you will need to change the open dialog’s default filter to show those files). Note that this is different from “Open Audio From Video”, that just loads the audio from the currently open video file.

Universal Subtitle Format: a post-mortem?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:36:00 +0100

The Universal Subtitle Format (USF) was an ambitious project. It was a XML-based subtitle format, supposed to replace the old and problematic community standard, Advanced Substation Alpha (ASS). It was chosen as the default subtitle format for the Matroska multimedia container, and was the primary format of Medusa’s unfortunate successor, ChronoSub.

It failed to achieve that goal.

This is what its page on CoreForge has to say:

The format is based on XML for many reasons: flexibility, human readability, portability, Unicode support, hierarchical system and easier management.

So, what happened to the competition?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:35:00 +0100

On July 9 2006, the last actively maintained ASS-Based General-Purpose Subtitling Software (henceforth ABGPSS) competition that Aegisub had - Sabbu - was dropped by its creator, kryptolus. Sabbu was an important program in the sense that it was the first ABGPSS to support Unicode and to be cross-platform. With Medusa and SubStation Alpha long dead, Subtitles Workshop being far from usable for anime fansubbing purposes, and SSATool designed for very specific purposes, Aegisub obtained monopoly on the ABGPSS business.

The future of Aegisub

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:12:00 +0100

Greetings to all readers, and welcome to our new blog!

I’m Rodrigo Monteiro (a.k.a. amz) and I’ve founded the Aegisub project together with Niels Hansen (jfs). Although I’ve written a good portion of all the code, lately real life has decided to get in my way and I haven’t been contributing much - which is part of the reason why development has been slow.

But, to get to the point, this is what we’re planning for the future of Aegisub: