Poor Quality Subtitle Text, Fonts, Typography

Hello everyone-
This is related to the post at [www.lafcpug.org], but since that's about a year and a half old, I thought I'd add a new one...

I've been pretty frustrated with the quality of subtitle text in DVD Studio (I'm currently using v.3). No matter what, it just doesn't seem of very high quality; because of the lack of antialiasing from what I hear around the forums out there. I've heard that the problem is with the DVD spec itself and not the software.

Don't know about that, but I've been using Belle-Nuit Subtitler recently to auto-generate TIFF files that are then imported to DVD Studio 3 via an STL-Graphic file. Just out of curiosity I opened one of the usual crappy-looking TIFF files in Photoshop and it looked pretty funny for sure -- a blue box with black text apparently stroked with red.

I hid the old text, created some new text in white -- making sure to use an italic font (Stone Sans) that would normally turn out pretty jaggy as subtitle text -- and overlaid it onto a blue box (same blue as in the original), "flattened" it and saved it as an uncompressed TIFF. I modified my STL-Graphic file to use this new file and re-imported into DVDSP.

The results are at [www.flatfishdesign.com]. The quality is much much better than I've yet seen in my efforts, either importing images into DVDSP or creating the subs directly in it. I've also included an image of the original TIFF, before tweaking.

I guess my question, aside from how to make the text white and not transparent (stroke with red?), is whether this seems like a viable way to get good quality subtitle text into DVDSP? And whether there really isn't anything limiting about the DVD spec? Yes, it's a lot of manual work, but the actual Photoshop steps could perhaps be automated, and Photoshop's typographical capabilities are far better than those in DVDSP. Mainly I'm trying to understand what DVDSP does with these files and why it cannot seem to make good looking subs. Any thoughts?

- Tom Tedeschi