Re: The need of newlines in WebVTT (was Re: Displaying multiple lines in WebVTT)

Since you ask.
>
> What do others think? Should we introduce an explicit line break
> character such as<br>  and ignore any CR and LF characters inside the
> cue?

It would be preferable if the form for breaking lines where an author 
expected them to occur could be automated, but I hazard a guess that it 
would be fairly difficult to gauge all the authors intended breaks.

I would be disappointed if the following could not be achieved one way 
or other.

I for one prefer to weight lines with the following rules:

1. Add more weight to the bottom of 2 lines, so that the caption eats 
less into the view port.

so instead of:

word word word word word word word
word word word

it would be:

word word word
word word word word word word word

2. If there is a rest in speech denoted by a comma, attempt to break the 
line immediately after the comma, thus breaking the line where there is 
a momentary break in speech. This gives the reader a chance to glance 
back at the video at the break:

word word word word,
word word word word word

but if there is more text before the comma on the 1st line than the 2nd 
do not attempt to modify the weight as stated in rule 1 because it is 
far better for reading if the break in speech is mimicked in the line 
break, again to give the reader a chance to glance back at the video.

word word word word word word,
word word word word

3. If there is more than 1 comma in the text attempt to weight more of 
them to them bottom line following rule 1.

word word word word,
word word word, word word word, word

If the above could be automated that would certainly deal with a big 
chunk of the cases where I insert breaks manually.

Next is more difficult

4. A momentary break in speech delimited with a comma is a great and 
easy way to deal with line breaks, but when they do not exist the next 
thing I look for are ways to end the top line with an important word and 
begin the bottom line with what follows. This helps the reader to pick 
out the important word which might otherwise be skipped or glossed over 
in the rush to read the rest of the sentence.  I couple this rule with 
rule 1 where the important word takes precedence:

Better

Once upon a time there was a word
that often got into a lot of trouble because it kept getting lost.

as opposed to

Once upon a time there was a word that often got into a lot of
trouble because it kept getting lost.

or

Once upon a time there was a
word that often got into a lot of trouble because it kept getting lost.

Perhaps there are some linguistic rules to cater for this, I only know 
them intuitively, not theoretically, but it definitely helps.

Tim

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2012 02:48:53 UTC