GNOME Subtitle Editor v0.3

Author: Isak Savo iso01001 at student.mdh.se

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Basic Usage
• Actions
• Spell-checker
• Preferences
• Troubleshooting
• Keyboard shortcuts
• End notes

Introduction

Gsubedit is an application for editing, converting and manipulating DivX subtitles. It can open and write MicroDVD and SupRip files and perform several actions upon them.

Basic usage

When Gsubedit is launched it will show an empty list, some buttons and a couple of text entries
To open a file, select open from the file-menu or toolbar and browse to the file you want to edit. Click open and it should appear in the list
Now you can edit the sub by selecting the appropriate line from the list and make the changes in the entries to the lower right! When finished editing, remember to press the 'update' button to insert the changes into the list.

If you want the changes to take place immediately, you can select 'apply changes to subtitle direct' from the preferences window.
(For more information regarding configuration, see Preferences below.)

Gsubedit has some actions to make your everyday subtitle editing easier.
Currently (v0.4) the following actions are available:

Displace frames

This tool is used to add or subtract time or frames from the subtitle.
If your subs appear too early or to late when watching a movie, and this delay does not change, then use this action. When selected, you will be presented with a dialog where you specify how many frames that should be added. To subtract, simply enter a negative amount.

If the file opened is of SubRip format then enter how many seconds that should be added/subtracted. You may enter decimal values such as '1.45'.

Framerate conversion

This action is used if the framerate of the sub is different from the movie.
If your subtitles appear at the wrong time, and this time delay increases throughout the movie (i.e. in the beginning of the movie, the text is delayed by 1 sec, and at the end it differs by 1 minute) then you have a sub with wrong framerate.
To find out what framerate a movie has, you can open it in Mplayer and check the output in the terminal. Look for a line similar to

 VIDEO:  [DIV3]  640x304  24bpp  23.98 fps  636.7 kbps (77.7 kbyte/s)

You can also select 'save file after conversion' if you want the file to be saved automatically after conversion. Use with caution!

Hearing impaired remover

This is used for subtitles which contains text like [laugh], [narrator] etc. It can also remove text that indicates singing (between @ signs)
Version 0.2 and above also support custom chars which enables you to specify a start char and end char that is used for hearing impaired

Split file

This action will split the currently open file in two parts.
When selected, a dialog will pop up which ask you to select two filenames for the new subs. Gsubedit will try to guess a name according to the current open file.
You must also specify the row where the split will occur. The row entered will be the last line of file 1.

Join files

This action is the opposite to split file and will ether join two files into one new or append a file to the one currently opened.
The frames/times in the second file will be increased by the number of the last line of the first file.

Example:

File one's last line ends on frame 12345 and file two's first line starts with 100 then the first line of the appended file will be 12445.

The spellchecker is actually a front-end to ispell/Aspell. The advantage by using a central spellchecker is that any words saved in the personal dictionary will be available from other programs that makes use of ispell.

Before the ispell can run properly it needs to know the language of the subtitle. This can be done on a case-by-case basis where you enter the language-code every time you start the spell-checker, or you may enter your most frequently used languages in the preferences-window.

The language-code is the same as the iso standard names for country- and language-representation. A full list is available at: http://www.twics.com/~craig/writings/linux-nihongo/node93.html
The code can be specified either:

• Specifying only the languagecode: sv for Swedish, en for English etc.
• Specifying a combination of languagecode and country code: sv_SE for Swedish, en_US for US English.

When the spell-checker starts it will scan the file for misspelled words and present you with a list of suggestions. If the the correct spelling of the word isn't available in the list then enter the correct word in the entry 'Replace with' and press 'Replace'. It is always the word in this entry that is the replacement word.

If a word is actually correct spelled, then there are two options:

1. "Add word": Will add the word lowercased into the personal dictionary. You should use this most of the time.
2. "Add word with case": This will save the word, with the case, into the personal dictionary. This is intended for names where the case matters.

The ignore buttons will cause ispell to ignore the words this session, but the next time ispell is launched it will consider them misspelled.

The progress of the spell-checker is shown in the statusbar of the main window.

The preferences window is launched from the 'settings' menu or from the toolbar.
Here you can specify how you want GSubEdit to behave and how to look.

Apply changes to subtitle direct

This will make the use of the 'update' button unnecessary. All text that is being entered into the text entries in the main window will automatically inserted into the list.

Toolbar style

Will set the toolbar style according to the option buttons. If you have problem with the toolbar taking up too much space, then set this to 'icons' and it will become smaller.

Subtitle type-detection

This is used to tell Gsubedit how to determine the file format of the subs that's being opened or saved. If all your SubRip files have the extension .srt and all MicroDVD subs have the extension .sub, then you can safely set this to 'By extension'.
GSubEdit will notify you if it can't find out what type that should be used!

Framerates

Here you can specify four framerates that will appear in the fps combo-boxes (in the main window, and in the FPS Conversion dialog).
Remember that you can always enter a custom framerate in the comboboxes whenever you want, although these wont be saved.

Spell Options

This is the options for the spellchecker. The first entry is the command to run, leave this untouched if unsure.
The second entry is used if you would like some extra commands sent to the spellchecker. See the ispell/Aspell manual for details but remember that if you send options that changes the output/input to the spellchecker then you're likely to crash gsubedit!

"Ask for language every time" will cause a dialog to appear before the spellchecker starts. In this dialog you are asked to specify the language code for the language that the subtitle is in. See the spellchecker section above for details.

If not checked then the language specified in the main window (in the "infobox" frame) will be used.

Language list: This is the list of languages that will appear in the infobox. The order of the list is the same as in the popdown menu. Use the up/down buttons to change the order.

The main problem that can occur when using gsubedit is that a subtitle is open incorrectly. Here follows some solutions and hints on how to avoid them.

• Warning "errors found in file, please check the result"
This occurs if gsubedit encountered any problem opening the file. This is usually due to a incorrect file.
If the file is of MicroDVD format, then it is likely that the file was missing a start or end-frame. You can open the file in a text editor and you should find something like

{1234}{5678}Some text to display

The most common problem here is that one {} is missing. Try locate and fix the error in the file and re-open the file.
GSubEdit will highlight the lines where an error occurred.


• Warning "Unable to determine file format for..."
This means that gsubedit failed to recognize the type of subtitle that the file is of. This occurs if the file isn't a sub (like some other random text file), or if a setting of some sort prevents it from finding out what it should be.
You can try changing the "subtitle type detection" in the preferences window, or specifying the --filetype arg on the command line.


• Internationalization (i18n)
Currently (as of version 0.4) Swedish, Russian, Czech and Romanian is available. I'm hoping that someone else will write more native translations and email them to me so I can include them in the main distribution.
If you make a translation and want to see if it works you have to set the $LANG var to your language. (for me, using zsh, i do 'export LANG=sv_SE' and then launch gsubedit)
Mail it to me and I'll include it!
More info on translation can be found on Gnome development page.

GSubEdits official homepage is: http://gsubedit.sourceforge.net/.
Be sure to check it for updates.

GSubEdit is beta/development software and could totally destroy your subs! Be sure to make backups before doing any hazardous operations