New Subtitle Workshop 6 Now Available!

[adenry]

Hello everyone!

My name is Andy and I'm happy to announce that Subtitle Workshop is back!

The new Subtitle Workshop 6.0 is available for download at our new website:
http://subworkshop.sf.net


Here's what's new in version 6.0 (build 130814):

• Based on Subtitle Workshop 2.51.

• A new Multiple Tags Mode, that allows working with multiple tags in a single subtitle.

• New Subtitle API version 1.15, which supports the new Multiple Tags Mode, adds a few new formats, and fixes issues with some old formats.
• Toolbar, Statusbar, Text Style Bars, and Time Control Buttons.
• Pause system - view and modify the time gap between two subtitles.
• Characters per Second (CpS) system.
• Duration and Pause columns in the Subtitles List.
• New error marking system - features constant automatic error rechecking and unique marking of every error type.
• New error types - Too short pauses, Too many CpS, Dialogue on one line, and more.
• New functions, including an Auto Combine Subtitles function.
• Improved old functions, including breaking on punctuation marks with Smart Line Adjust.
• New context menus for the Subtitles List and the Text and Translation fields.
• Easier timing values editing and shifting with the mouse wheel in different ways.
• Improved In-place edition.
• Greatly extended Information & Errors window functionality.

• Custom Info system - search for subtitles in the subtitle file based on custom user-defined rules about the timing or the text.
• Extended Various Information window information.
• Subtitle marking can be saved in a .SRF file.
• Many new settings, including default new subtitle duration and pause values.

• Volume Control, Audio Stream selection, and Video Renderer selection in the Video Preview.
• Zooming, Full Screen Mode, Aspect Ratio selection, and a new context menu in the Video Preview.
• Visual subtitle representation in the Video Preview Seekbar.
• Many more video and audio formats can be opened (as long as the system has the codecs for them).

• New Pascal Script functions.
• Many bug fixes.
• And much more... (see changelog.txt for the full list of changes)

Give it a try!
Send us your feedback and let us know what you think!

[jcdr]

Doesn't seem to support UTF-8 ?

[SimplyTheBOSS]

Doesn't seem to support UTF-8 ?

He told me yesterday that it will be the next step.

[jcdr]

It should have been the first step for a new version !
Then I'll wait for the correction to use it.

EDIT : SW developers have to realize that ISO-8859-{1-15}, DOS and MacOS encodings are still in use.
Depending on the latin based language, there are up to about 20 different ways to correctly encode a subtitle in 8-bit encoding, and each encoding can give different reading results.

UTF8 has been launched 20 years ago to avoid these problems. Users still use obsolete encodings, because some softwares like SW encourage them to do so, by not supporting UTF8 which should be the de facto standard.

So my advice is to boycott those 'obsolete' softwares and use better alternatives such as Subtitle Edit.

[adenry]

Subtitle Workshop is a very old application and was not written with Unicode in mind.

Partial Unicode support (importing Unicode subtitles and exporting to Unicode) will be coming very soon.
Full Unicode support will be coming in the future, but it is not easy to implement, as the entire application must be adapted to work with Unicode internally. This is a very difficult and exhaustive process, so it will take time. But it will happen.

[jcdr]

Full Unicode support will be coming in the future, but it is not easy to implement, as the entire application must be adapted to work with Unicode internally. This is a very difficult and exhaustive process, so it will take time. But it will happen.

SW6 is written and compiled with Delphi 7? It is not compatible with Unicode (and 64 bits / Windows 7 or 8 ), you should at least use Delphi XE4.
Or better, it is worth switching to a .NET compatible language if you really want the software to evolve. The main competitor Subtitle Edit is written in C#.

[adenry]

Full Unicode support will be coming in the future, but it is not easy to implement, as the entire application must be adapted to work with Unicode internally. This is a very difficult and exhaustive process, so it will take time. But it will happen.

SW6 is written and compiled with Delphi 7? It is not compatible with Unicode (and 64 bits / Windows 7 or 8 ), you should at least use Delphi XE4.
Or better, it is worth switching to a .NET compatible language if you really want the software to evolve. The main competitor Subtitle Edit is written in C#.

Full Unicode support is not impossible in Delphi 7, it's just more difficult. The partial support (converting from and to Unicode) is fully possible and already in test phase. And by the way that partial support would be enough for many people.
But, yes, we'll be moving along from Delphi 7 to something new for various reasons, one of which the Unicode support. We're still discussing where to go right now.
Wherever we go to, the migration process would be difficult and will take quite some time, so just have patience.

[jcdr]

Adenry, please don't be offended by my critics, indeed I appreciate your hard work to have SW back on the scene. Only IMO you should have integrated partial UTF-8 (which is a very easy step) before releasing a new major version.

BTW you should also include GB18030 for our Chinese friends, as even Unicode-6 does not fully cover all HKCS and other Chinese character sets yet.

EDIT:

Full Unicode support is not impossible in Delphi 7, it's just more difficult.

Sure. What I meant is, C++ TChar doesn't even have any Delphi equivalent, you have to use old internal libraries like api.windows.pas or external libraries like VFW.pas which are not totally Unicode or Windows-7 compatible -and which are not maintained anymore- etc. But I think you know all that.

A good one BTW, so that you can understand my crusade : This user is using Subtitle Workshop, didn't even know about UTF-8 as it was not available, so ended up uploading his subs with Romanian diacritics removed, because he didn't find any other solution to display his subs correctly on standalone players. All softwares display CP1252 by default as 8-bit encoding detection is near impossible, so thanks to SW and other obsolete softwares, non Western European users have to see incorrectly decoded subs on their screens. So please, I urge you to release the partial UTF-8 version asap.