Reformat lines

Reformat and word-wrap subtitle lines - split too long lines and merge too short lines. The function works in 3 steps:

1. Text preparation - Prepare the lines of the subtitle.
2. WordWrap - Split the lines that are too long
3. Post processing - Split subtitles that have too many lines or merge single-liners.

The text preparation has these modes:

• Merge and separate dialogs: Merge all lines that do not start with the Dialog separator. Empty lines are leaved and spaces trimmed. The result are lines of dialogs
• Do not merge: Do not merge lines, only leave empty lines and trim spaces.
• Merge all lines: Merge all lines, even if they start with a dialog separator. Also remove empty lines & trim spaces. The result is a single line.

The next phase is WordWrap. In this phase the long lines are split. The maximum length has these options:

• Mode
• Text width: The text width using the subtitle's style is compared against the reference screen width (Settings).
• Character count: The lines must have at most the count of character that can be specified in the bottom edit box. Useful for some HW DivX players.
• Pad with: In the Character count mode the lines can be padded with the specified character (mostly space) up to the specified width. Useful for some HW DivX players.

The WordWrap has 2 modes:

• Similar length: Try to split the lines so all the resulting parts have similar length.
• Screen boundary: Split the lines when they exceed the screen or character boundary.

The Similar length mode yields better results when the words are short. With long words the lines may be significantly different in length. If the line contains a single word that is longer than the limit, this word is not split (it stays on a single line). When the lines are close in length to the multiple of the limit, in the Similar length mode they can be sometimes divided to more parts (one more) than in the Screen boundary mode.

The last phase is Post processing. There are 2 options for this phase:

• Split subtitles with more lines: Split the subtitles that have more lines than specified in the edit box. The duration of the resulting subtitles is calculated from the original duration in the ratio of the character counts.
• Try to keep original lines together: When a line is reformatted and split to more lines, SP will try to keep the resulting lines together when splitting subtitles with more lines. To achieve this, the subtitle may be split to more subtitles than necessary, but it will keep for example a dialog line (that was split to 2 lines) in one subtitles.
• Merge adjacent single-line subtitles: Merge subtitles that are closer than the specified time.

The reformat is performed by clicking on the Reformat button. If the Mark changed subtitles checkbox is checked, all touched subtitles are marked.