Punjabi subtitle & caption generator

Gurmukhi letters hang from a headline, and its vowel signs sit on every side. ਿ is written before the consonant and ੀ after it, each curling up over the headline; ੇ, ੈ, ੋ and ੌ ride above it, and ੁ and ੂ hang beneath. The adhak, ੱ, is a small curved mark placed over a letter to show that the consonant after it is doubled.

Gurmukhi joins consonants into combined shapes far less often than Devanagari does. One form it does use is a small ਰ tucked under the first consonant, as in ਸ੍ਰੀ. That word is part of ਸਤਿ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ, the sample the font list shows beside every Gurmukhi face, and the sample also contains ਿ, so scanning the list shows how each face draws both.

The editor files Punjabi fonts under the script's name. On a Gurmukhi transcript their group is headed Gurmukhi — your language, and typing gurmukhi into the font search finds all nine faces from anywhere in the list, which typing punjabi does not. Left to an English template, Gurmukhi is drawn in Baloo Paaji 2, a heavy face with rounded ends.

Gurmukhi captions reach viewers who learned that script. A viewer who reads Punjabi only in Shahmukhi, or who speaks Punjabi without reading either script, cannot read them, and romanised Punjabi is then the option that keeps the original words.

An English translation reaches viewers who do not speak Punjabi, but it drops a choice Punjabi makes whenever it addresses someone. ਤੂੰ, the familiar you, and ਤੁਸੀਂ, the respectful or plural one, both become you in English, so a clip whose humour depends on how people address each other loses that layer in translation.

The adhak changes meaning, not only pronunciation: ਪਤਾ means knowledge or an address, while ਪੱਤਾ means a leaf. Check it wherever the speaker doubles a consonant, and check the nasal dot ਂ in words such as ਨਹੀਂ and ਤੁਸੀਂ, where it belongs to the standard spelling.

The same pair shows why a romanised transcript needs a consistent rule for doubled letters: patta and pata differ by one letter and mean different things, so a transcript that doubles consonants in some words and not in others can mislead a viewer.