Persian subtitles in YouTube

[Jamshyd Fararooy]

I have a question on Persian subtitles in YouTube. For my new YouTube clip which is in Farsi, I wanted to also put Farsi subtitles. The problem is the input shows correctly in the YouTube Studio editor but when I publish it, the subtitles on the actual clip are showing some Farsi letters in unicode isolated form rather than the medial,  initial or final forms that they should automatically take in the middle of the word. I tried many ways. first I created a .srt format text file for English and it works perfectly - as you can see on the clip. I then tried the same with Farsi UTF-8 with and without BOM, tried direct input, etc., and none of them work. Any advice? 1/2

2/2 By the way, I'm also having the same problem in MS Word with the font Arial Unicode MS. Doesn't automatically take correct positional form. If you watch my video, the first Persian subtitle looks correct but that's because I typeset it manually in Unicode - so you can make it work but it's not automatic. The link to the video is <https://youtu.be/Fr6pdu_g2U8>

[Behnam Esfahbod]

Hi Jamshyd,

Re problem 1:

As of 2022, YouTube uses the HTML "video" tag on most platforms, and the subtitle is also rendered via the HTML technology, using a "span" of text.

For example, this is how the video and subtitle are built into the HTML page on a Chrome on MacOS browser:

And, the result is a proper rendering of the CC text on the page, as seen here:

If you have any problems with that text being rendering on a YouTube page, there's a chance that the browser/OS you're using is lacking some latest features, or have some bugs with rendering text. I don't think there's much YouTube can/would do to fix that, either way.

Re problem 2:

It's a known issue with some versions of "Arial" font files from Microsoft. IIRC, they fixed it at some point—probably early 2010s—but I could be wrong. Maybe a search in the archives of Persian-Computing lists would help answering that. Personally, though, I would suggest avoiding using the font for Persian text to start with; the design isn't really worth taking that risk.

Hope you find these helpful,

-b

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Behnam Esfahbod | بهنام اسفهبد | Q4880939 Q2064908 | behnam.es

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:31 AM Jamshyd Fararooy <jams...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a question on Persian subtitles in YouTube. For my new YouTube clip which is in Farsi, I wanted to also put Farsi subtitles. The problem is the input shows correctly in the YouTube Studio editor but when I publish it, the subtitles on the actual clip are showing some Farsi letters in unicode isolated form rather than the medial,  initial or final forms that they should automatically take in the middle of the word. I tried many ways. first I created a .srt format text file for English and it works perfectly - as you can see on the clip. I then tried the same with Farsi UTF-8 with and without BOM, tried direct input, etc., and none of them work. Any advice? 1/2

2/2 By the way, I'm also having the same problem in MS Word with the font Arial Unicode MS. Doesn't automatically take correct positional form. If you watch my video, the first Persian subtitle looks correct but that's because I typeset it manually in Unicode - so you can make it work but it's not automatic. The link to the video is <https://youtu.be/Fr6pdu_g2U8>

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[Jamshyd Fararooy]

Thank you very much Behnam, 

Your comments are valuable; sorry I missed replying earlier.