Background

This page is an optional read.

Back around in 2012, unanimated wrote a guide for typesetting and almost all the typesetters, including me, learned from it for the next decade. Although it was briefly updated in 2015 and 2018, the content of the guide remained largely the same. During that time, a lot changed and while the guide was sufficient to teach a beginner the basics of typesetting, they were also expected to learn much more after it for which there was no singular source to learn from.

The knowledge was spread throughout various discord channels and was taught mostly through word-of-mouth. Some attempts were made to consolidate them: pins in discord or fansubbing wiki to which I have made few contributions myself. However, a single source that covers them did not emerge as I'm beginning to write this guide.

My goal in writing this guide is pretty simple: I want there to be a place I and other fansubbers can link to when someone asks, "How do I learn typesetting?". I also want to know when a beginner has not done their due diligence and hasn't tried to learn the basics using the resources that are available to them. I want someone who has never typesetted in their life before, never even heard of Aegisub before, read this guide from start to finish and be caught up with the current method of typesetting.

About this guide

When I began to write this guide, the first thing I did was write the table of contents for the guide. I made a few variations of it. One version had me teaching how to use Aegisub script from the very beginning of the guide. However, I scrapped that idea pretty fast as I concluded people who learn it that way will always be limited by what those scripts can do.

This is why there will be a lot of reading in this guide before you typeset a single sign. This is because I want you to start from the very basics and move up from there. So when you learn about Aegisub scripts, you should know that you have learned the basics and are now ready to do the real typesetting.

This guide is still a work in progress. What you are reading is the first draft of the guide. That is why you may see things that are incomplete or simply missing.