Hindi caption templates

Devanagari hangs its letters from the shirorekha, a stroke along the top that joins a word into one shape. That stroke is made of short pieces, one per letter. Several templates add letter spacing, and any amount of it pulls those pieces apart. A caption that looks sliced along the top needs less Letter spacing, which lives in the Spacing section.

Marks also reach past the stroke. Above it sit े and ै; the loops of ि and ी climb over it; below the letter hang ु, ू and ृ. Clusters reshape र: a hook riding on the following letter in धर्म, a slanting tick beneath प in प्रेम. And क्ष looks almost nothing like the क and ष it is built from. Where a template stacks two rows or more and one row's lower marks meet the next row's upper marks, add Line spacing.

A template whose font is purely Latin cannot draw Devanagari, so its Hindi falls back to Baloo 2, which is bold and rounded; any Latin words remain in the template's own font. Just below Family is Native script font. Pick a Devanagari face there to replace Baloo 2 without touching the Latin. Its first entry, Match the Latin font, removes your pick again. The list holds sixty Devanagari families, for example:

Romanised output is the default, and for Hinglish it is often the natural choice, because Hindi gets typed in Latin letters on phones all the time. It does have two catches. A few Hindi words share an English spelling, so a fast caption reading is, us or main may be taken as English when the speaker meant इस, उस or मैं. And Latin letters don't mark vowel length reliably: की (of) and कि (that) can both end up as ki.

Devanagari shows those differences plainly and suits anyone who reads Hindi in its own script. English opens the video to viewers without Hindi, at a cost to timing. The verb usually closes a Hindi sentence but follows the subject in English, so word-by-word highlighting cannot track the speaker. A translated sentence still starts when its Hindi original starts, with the English words spread across it; play the result through before you export.

Several common words have two spellings in use: हिंदी and हिन्दी, हाँ and हां, ज़िंदगी written with the nukta dot under ज and without it. Choose one of each and the video looks tidier. In a romanised transcript, English words and brand names deserve the closest look, since the Latin text is a conversion of a Devanagari transcript, not something written in Latin first.

Templates that highlight a word may also show one word per caption marked for emphasis, chosen automatically. That choice ignores है, का and में, and the romanised hai, ka and mein, but it can still land on the wrong word. Select a word and press E to toggle the mark.