Odia subtitle & caption generator

Odia has no headline. Most of its letters are topped instead by a broad curve, so the upper edge of an Odia line is a run of arcs rather than a straight bar. Some vowel signs sit in front of the consonant: େ appears to its left though it is pronounced after it, and ୋ is that sign plus a stroke on the right. ୁ, ୂ and ୃ attach below.

Consonant clusters often put the second consonant into a reduced form beneath the first, which adds a second tier of shapes under the line alongside those vowel signs.

The font list offers Noto Sans Oriya and Anek Odia as sans-serifs, Noto Serif Oriya as a serif, Baloo Bhaina 2 as a rounded display face, and Alkatra, which also draws Bengali and Devanagari. Baloo Bhaina 2 is also the fallback, so an English template applied to an Odia transcript already shows one of the five.

Two of those names say Oriya, the older English spelling of the language's name, officially replaced by Odia in 2011. Searching the font list for odia returns all five faces; oriya returns only the two Noto ones.

With so few faces, the rest of a style carries more of the difference between one Odia caption and the next: its colours, outline, a box behind the line and the way words animate in.

The language's own name shows how romanised Odia can vary. ଓଡ଼ିଆ contains ଡ଼, a sound English has no letter for, which is why the name has been written both Oriya and Odia. Other words with that letter need the same decision when romanised.

Romanised output also changes the font question: the transcript is in Latin letters, so the Family list is no longer limited to Odia's five faces. An English translation does the same for viewers who do not speak Odia. Odia script remains the version that shows readers of Odia the words as they write them.

A dot is all that separates ଡ଼ from ଡ, and swapping them misspells the word, so look at every word that contains either. When you retype a word in the editor, enter େ after its consonant even though it is drawn in front: the text is stored in spoken order, and the sign is moved into place on screen.