You can change the appearance of your subtitles either manual, or by using styles. We will focus on manually changing the appearance and positioning of your subs first. Changing your subtitles with styles will be much easier after you have done it by hand first.

Step 3 After we have saved the file created in section 2 we will have to switch to to the text edit screen by clicking the 'switch' button located in the middle of the SSA screen. Clicking on it from the text edit screen will bring you back to the wave screen.

Step 3.1 The wave screen will be replaced by the screen below. You must leave the D (we are working with Dialogue/text) selected. Cancel overrides will remove anything you have entered with the style override option. Do not worry about the margin overrides yet either, that will come later.To change our fonts and place our text where we want it, click on the 'Style override' button.

Step 3.2 The window that comes up after clicking the styles override should look extremely familiar. It is an ordinary font selector. Besides changing the font type, size, color and style you can also change the positioning here. After selecting the fonts, colors and allignment click OK

Next click in the textbox, you MUST hit enter or the changes you just made will NOT take effect, clicking on anything that will cause your edit screen to become 'inactive' will nullify everything you just did. Hit enter from the text box before you do anything else.

Alignment will align horizontally either Left, Centre or Right.
Type will determine where your text gets positioned vertically, Top, Middle or Sub(bottom).
The actual position will not get determined until you are encoding and will depend on the resolution of your movie. If after encoding/previewing your movie you think your text is not in the right place you can tweak the positioning with the Margin Overrides option from the previous screen.
Alpha level determines transparency of your fonts

Font choice is very important. You can ruin a show by using an unreadable font no matter how cool it looks. The color you use should be chosen with care also. Dark backgrounds are easier to work with than light ones since just about anything looks good on it. Also, it is not recommended to change fonts mid show, use different font colors to emphasize a difference (someone's thoughts Vs actual speech is an example) instead, or maybe use italic. You will have to play with these settings a bit until you find something that works for you.

Now that you have found a font and color combination that works for you, you are ready to start using styles. Styles will make changing the appearance a lot easier and faster.

Step 3.3 Select the define option from the Styles menu

Step 3.4 This menu is used to maintain your styles. Select new to start creating our new style.

Step 3.5 The style configuration lets you configure everything we did by hand before. Make sure you name it before you do anything. You can also change the default style.

Step 3.6 Now all you have to do to change the look and/or positioning of your fonts is selecting a style from the style menu. The same goes for styles as did for changes made by hand. You MUST hit enter from the textbox after you have made your changes or they will NOT take effect.

Time flies when your having fun huh? It was only a few minutes ago when we first started this trip. You are now ready for part 4, the last part of this guide and the only thing you need to do to have your movie subtitled.

Go to Step 4 - Combining (Encoding) your movie with your subtitles