Templates
Odia subtitle & caption generator
Odia captions can be in ଓଡ଼ିଆ, in Roman letters, or translated into English. The previews below are in Odia, whose rounded letters carry vowel signs on more than one side, so check each style's spacing before you choose.
No Odia templates have been published yet. Any template in the full gallery can still caption Odia: letters its own font cannot draw come from the Odia fallback face.
Captioning in Odia
Devanagari has sixty font families in Captionwale. Odia has five. That difference runs through every choice about Odia captions: how much the face matters, how much the rest of the style has to contribute, and when romanised text gives you more room to work. The shape of the script, and how the language's own name is spelt, play a part too.
Rounded tops and stacked clusters
Odia letters don't hang from a straight headline. Most are capped with a wide curve, so the top of an Odia line is a sequence of arcs. Some vowel signs are written before the consonant: େ goes on its left though it is heard after it, and ୋ adds a stroke on the right to that same sign. ୁ, ୂ and ୃ attach underneath.
When consonants cluster, the second one frequently takes a smaller form beneath the first. Together with the vowel signs below, that creates a lower storey of shapes beneath the text.
Five Odia faces and their names
The five are Anek Odia and Noto Sans Oriya, both sans-serif; Noto Serif Oriya, a serif; Baloo Bhaina 2, rounded and made for display; and Alkatra, which also draws Devanagari and Bengali. Baloo Bhaina 2 doubles as the fallback: put an English template on an Odia transcript and you are already looking at one of them.
Oriya, seen in two of those names, is the older English spelling of the language. The official spelling became Odia in 2011. A font search for odia lists all five faces, but a search for oriya lists only the two from Noto.
With so little choice of face, the rest of the style does more of the work of telling one Odia caption from another: colours, outline, a box behind the text, and the way the words come in.
Romanised Odia: gains and losses
How to romanise Odia is visible in the name itself. ଓଡ଼ିଆ includes ଡ଼, a sound without an English letter of its own; hence both Oriya and Odia. Every word containing that letter needs the same choice when written in Latin letters.
Romanising also widens the font choice. A transcript in Latin letters is no longer tied to the five Odia faces in the Family list. An English translation has the same effect, and reaches people who don't speak Odia. Odia script, though, remains the one that shows Odia readers their words as they would write them.
Proofreading Odia text
ଡ଼ and ଡ differ by a dot, and mixing them up gives a misspelling, so inspect every word with either letter. If you retype a word in the editor, type େ after the consonant, even though it is displayed in front. The text is saved in the order it is spoken, and the sign is moved to its place on screen.
Questions
Why does Captionwale have so few Odia fonts?
Odia has had far fewer typefaces designed for it than Devanagari, and the editor offers five. If you want more choice, a romanised transcript unlocks every Latin face.
Why do some Odia fonts have Oriya in their names?
Oriya was the official English spelling until 2011. Anek Odia, Noto Sans Oriya and Noto Serif Oriya all draw the same script.