In a previous article, I introduced gsubedit, a GNOME Subtitle Editor for linux using GTK. It was the best subtitles editor I'd ever found for linux.

Recently, I found a new project, that even it is quite young, has a lot to offer. Namely subtitleeditor. It supports any kind of subtitles format, allows you to move, change framerate and much more.

Here is an introduction to subtitleeditor. Subtitleeditor is GTK+2 subtitle editor sofware released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), it makes subtitles editing really easy, in a few clicks you can create subtitles, change the framerate, move subtitles...

Here is the full list of featrues:

• Can create new subtitle
• Open and Save subtitle (SSA, ASS, SubRip (srt), MicroDvd (sub))
• Add, Delete subtitles entries
• FPS convertion
• Scale
• Find, Find and replace
• Check time and encoding errors

INSTALLING SUBTITLEEDITOR:

If you are running ubuntu or debian, you can get the .deb package from the origibal site. And install it using:

tester@laptop:~$sudo dpkg -i /path/to/subtitleeditor-0.7.2.deb

other people might compile it (check out that you have all the dependencies installed on your computer first).

nota: in order to build this package, you need to have automake-1.7 installed. Make sure that this version will be used by default. People running a debian system might use

tester@laptop:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config automake

and choose automake-1.7.

tester@laptop:~$tar -xzvf subtitleeditor-0.7.2.tar.gz

tester@laptop:~$cd subtitleeditor-0.7.2/

tester@laptop:~/subtitleeditor-0.7.2$ sudo ./autogen.sh && make && make install

After configuring, compiling and installing subtitleeditor, the binaries and other files should be installed in /usr/local/.

Now let's try it out!

nota Through this article, anything between parentheses and in bold will denotate a key binding shortcut. ex: (Ctrl+N)

CREATING NEW SUBTITLES:

First of all, launch subtitleeditor :):

tester@laptop:~$subtitleeditor

Once subtitle editor is opened, create a new subtitle file (Ctrl+N) and start creating a new entry (Insert). Then you can set the time the subtitle starts at, the time the subtitle stop at, a style and the text that has to be shown on screen.

As you can see, there is a style column. This allows you to define the style the subtitles should be display with (bold, italic, red colored...). To create custom styles, click on Tools->Style Editor and then create a new style by clicking on the top left icon, give it a name, press enter and the define the style you want.

Now, you can use the predefined style from the main window, as shown below:

Then carry on insering new line with (Insert) if you want to insert it after the current selected line, or before the selected line using (Ctrl+Insert) and there you go :).

Once you are done, you can save and export the subtitles to:

• Formats using style: .ssa, .ass
• Formats not supporting style: .srt, .sub

Please, that's it for now, I introduce subtitleeditor as being a great tool for creating subtitles. I will carry on later on to show you how to easily translate or resynchronise subtitles.

Cheerio