Styling captions
A caption’s look is a style: a font, colours, a background, an animation and where it sits. The Presets tab starts you from a finished look, and the other tabs change any part of it. The preview redraws as you move a control, and the export uses exactly the same drawing.
The looks
Section titled “The looks”| Look | What it does |
|---|---|
| Purple Punch | A coloured box slides from word to word as it is said. The default. |
| Bold | Heavy type, each word popping as it is said. |
| Plain | Clean captions with no animation. |
| Karaoke | The colour sweeps across each word as it is spoken. |
| Paper | The word being said is highlighted. |
| Boom | Big, bouncing words in a display font. |
| Lyric | The line is soft and dim until each word is reached, then sharp. Nothing moves. |
| Stickers | Each word on its own coloured label. |
| Cinema | A serif face with words fading in. |
| Terminal | A monospaced, highlighted look. |
| Neon | A glowing neon face. |
| Typewriter | Words typed out one at a time. |
| Handwritten | A handwriting face with a marker stroke drawn under each word. |
A preset sets the whole style, so pick it first and adjust after. Selecting one keeps your caption position, font size and words per line, which belong to your video.
- Font: pick one of the fonts in use, or More fonts to search the whole Google Fonts catalogue. Inter, Poppins and Montserrat come with the app. Any other font is downloaded from Google Fonts by the server the first time it is used, then kept, so the preview and the export use the same file. (On a server with no internet, a font that was never fetched falls back to Inter.)
- Font size, Letter case (normal or uppercase) and Slant (upright or italic).
- Text color and Highlight colors: a list of one to four colours. The first is the main one. A look that marks each word (the lit word, a box, a label, an underline) takes the colours in turn, a single shape (the sliding box, the progress bar) uses the first, and a sweep runs through all of them. Add a colour with +, remove one with × (the first cannot be removed).
- Words per line: how many words are shown together. A line also ends where the speaker paused.
- Word spacing.
Background
Section titled “Background”The box behind the caption: None, Solid or Pill, with its color and opacity.
Animation
Section titled “Animation”Choose how the words are marked as they are said: Highlight, Box, Pop, Fade, Karaoke, Underline, Typewriter, Bounce, Focus, Slide, Progress, Stickers, or None. Each tile shows the animation on your own caption.
Outline
Section titled “Outline”Stroke width for the outline around the letters, a Shadow (blur, and how far down and to the right it falls) and a Glow with its own colour.
Timing
Section titled “Timing”One offset, in milliseconds, that moves every caption earlier or later against the audio. See Editing.
Position
Section titled “Position”Drag the caption in the preview while the video is paused. It snaps to the centre lines of the picture.
Your own looks
Section titled “Your own looks”The built-in presets are plain data in the repository
(presets.json),
shared by the web app, the API and the iPhone app. A new look is an entry there.
Scripts and fonts
Section titled “Scripts and fonts”The preview and the export are drawn by one engine with the fonts it finds. Captions in Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai and CJK scripts use a font that has those letters when the chosen font lacks them.