1 I thought the font seemed a bit bulky as well; although, I'll admit to preferring less intrusive subtitle fonts in general.  In Lucky Star's case, I think it's complicated somewhat by the way in which many of the shots are composed, with the subjects and "action" often near the bottom of the frame.

Typically, when I watch subtitled anime, my eyes shoot to the bottom of the screen for a split second when the subtitle first appears, and then back up to the action, so that I'm not really focusing on both at the same time.  Watching Lucky Star, however, I had a difficult time separating the two, as they always seemed to occupy the same general space.  I suspect the larger font wouldn't have been so much an issue had the subtitle been placed lower in the frame, but I suppose there are overscan issues to consider.  Although, I do wonder:  is overscan really much of a concern with these 16:9 shows?

2

Unfortunately, yes; so long as you're formatting for NTSC display, overscan is more or less the same as usual. Hopefully that won't be a problem with high-def formats. On the other hand, I can't deliver subtitles for a high-def format with my current software, so maybe I shouldn't complain? ;p

The idea has been floated to have multiple subtitle tracks for various display modes on 16:9 titles, but our experiments with that at ADV didn't go well; basically there's no reliable way for the player to determine exactly what the viewer is doing with the show, so there's no good way to say "okay, use the subtitle track with the subs dropped into the black bar at the bottom" or "okay, they're watching on a 16:9 display, so don't put any subs in the black" or whatever. Completely aside from the extra work involved in making additional subtitle tracks, of course, which are pretty outrageous for Lucky Star even on a good day...

I experimented with moving the subtitles for future volumes, putting subtitles at the top of the screen when the top is totally empty and the bottom has all of the action going on. Not really an ideal solution, as having subtitles moving around is a little distracting, but at the same time "totally obscuring the characters" is not exactly a good result either, so I figure it's worth a shot. I also went with top-and-bottom subs for those sequences with a lot of background speech. It's a little outside the "normal" subtitling procedure, but Lucky Star is busy enough (and focused at the bottom of the screen often enough) to make it worth the effort, I hope.

I'm actually glad that I'm not using a skinnier font. I've got a pretty good characters-per-line as it is, actually even higher than the old ADV subs, so there's relatively few times where I'm having to compromise the translation to fit the sub. If I had a thinner font, there'd be an awful lot of characters per line, which would make keeping the reading speed reasonable more difficult.

All that said, it's not like I've hit the perfect balance or anything, just what I'm hoping is a good one within the limitations of the equipment. I'd actually like to experiment with a thicker font border, but I'm afraid that it'll turn some trivial-manual operations into highly nontrivial ones. (Then again, if I'm using top-and-bottom subs, the number of those incidences should be small to begin with... so maybe I'll experiment with vol. 3 and see how it looks.)