Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to the Subtitle Edit training series. In the previous episodes, we've learned how to speed up the time-coding work using customized shortcuts. This time, let's share more handy tools to speed up the line-breaking and splitting work. If you look carefully, the transcription texts already had breaks at full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks, etc. However, according to our guidelines, we don't allow very long sentences in a single line, so we need to add line breaks properly. Sometimes, sentences are just too long to display in a single subtitle, even with a break. In that case, they must be split into multiple subtitles instead. Before taking any captioning jobs, make sure you've well learned about our official guidelines on how to make appropriate breaks and splits. We won't cover them here too much, but you must always follow the guidelines. However, for specific jobs, there may be additional rules required, so please always pay attention to the job comment. Now let's talk about the default workflow and how to speed it up using shortcuts. Normally, the recommended captioning workflow would be, first, try to focus on making time quotes for all transcripts throughout the media, and then go back to fix all errors left. Finally, using the Fix Common Errors tool to fix errors like unneeded spaces, periods, etc. According to our official guidelines, we should break a long subtitle into two lines when the maximum single line length exceeds our profile setup. Take this one for example. Pay attention to the single line length value here. As known as characters per line, or CPL, now it shows 43, meaning totally there are 43 characters in this particular caption, including spaces and punctuation. And it is in red because it exceeds the CPL value we've set up, which is 37. You can confirm it by clicking the profile name at the bottom right corner of the info bar. By the way, you can also quickly switch among profiles here, but we don't need to do that for our job. All right, let's try to solve this issue. Maybe we can use the auto-breaking button first. Well, the result is fine, but I think it could be better to break after this comma here. That's just from my experience, because if I were the audience, I would prefer this way. So remember, you should always put yourself in the audience position to do better jobs. For that, normally, what I would do is to unbreak it first, then put the text cursor at the expected position, then press enter. I have to remove this extra space as well, so it's kind of time-consuming because quite a few clicks are involved. Do I have to do that for every caption? No worries, we have a nice shortcut as a one-key solution for that. Open the shortcuts list, and search for break at first space from cursor position. This is what we need. We recommend using alt space for the shortcut here. So toggle alt, and then open the key list. Then just hit the spacebar on the keyboard, and don't forget to update it before clicking OK. Let's go back to the initial state. Now comes the fancy part. Just simply put the text cursor before the first word of the second line, or you can even put it anywhere within the first word before that. Then hit alt space, voila, and no extra space to remove. Besides, there is another workflow to focus on fixing auto-breaks only, without using the mouse. For that, we need to set two more shortcuts. This is optional, but you'll see how efficient it will be after trying it. Open the shortcuts list again. Find move first word from next line up.

Speaker 2: Set a shortcut like ctrl up as we recommended. And ctrl down for move last word from first line down. Now let's see how it works.

Speaker 1: When focusing under this view, you can use up arrow key or down arrow key to move up or down between subtitles. Now just try the two shortcuts we just set.

Speaker 2: After fixing this one, you can go to next, next, and next until all lines are revealed.

Speaker 1: Remember the split line and cursor video position feature we mentioned in the previous episode? It is a very commonly used feature, and you can also assign a shortcut for it. Go to options, settings, switch to shortcuts, search for split line. Here it is. For that, we recommend using ctrl alt space. By the way, for all shortcuts that have to be used in textbox, we recommend not using character-related shortcuts, even with modifiers like ctrl shift or alt key, because we don't want to type in any unwanted characters by accident. So you may want to use function keys or modifiers with the space key like what we do here. Again, let's see how to use it. For a long caption that has to be split into two, first place the video cursor somewhere it should be, then go to the textbox and place the text cursor where it should be, then hit the shortcut ctrl alt space as we just said. That's it. Sometimes, it is more efficient to merge two lines first, then resplit at an expected position. You may notice that when we import plain text, there's an option called auto break text. All subtitles will be automatically added auto breaks, in order to try to respect the cpl rules we set. In fact, you can still do that after importing, by first press ctrl a to select all lines in the list view, then press the auto breaking button. However, the auto break position doesn't always respect our guidelines by default. So normally, we recommend adding breaks manually, but there are some settings to improve the result for our jobs. Go to options, settings, switch to tools, find auto breaking section, then you may want to enable every option here. Considering that we often need to break before words like prepositions, conjunctions, or pronouns, etc. It will be nice to add them to the do not break after list. So click edit. Let's just try typing something like to, then press add. That's the way to add values. We've collected a bunch of words like this. You can simply copy that in the video description below, then paste it here and choose regular expression. Click add, then click OK. In this way, the auto breaking result would respect more on our guidelines. However, we still have to review carefully to make sure everything is OK. Warning, for our jobs, we do not accept auto breaks without review. Captioning is kind of a linear job, but you can't finish it just in one action. It needs practice, patience, and experience to do a good job. Remember, quality is king. And we will share some best practices in quality control in the following episodes. Don't miss it. See you next time.