Writing
What we measured while building this.
Notes from building a captioning engine — the standards we read, the things we got wrong, and the numbers behind decisions that are usually described as taste.
Bright footage kills white captions, and shadow cannot save them
Why we stopped adding drop shadow to captions over blown-out frames and started flipping the ink instead — with the thresholds we settled on.
· 6 min read
Why your Hindi captions look broken even when the text is right
Devanagari fails in video captions for typographic reasons, not transcription ones. The five faults to look for, and what fixing them actually requires.
· 7 min read
Hinglish is not a language, which is why your caption tool cannot write it
Caption tools now advertise language lists in the hundreds. Code-mixed speech is missing from all of them, and the reason is architectural rather than a gap in coverage.
· 6 min read
What gets written here, and what does not
Captioning looks like a solved problem from the outside. Transcribe the audio, put the words on the screen, done. Almost every hard part of it is invisible until you have shipped something and watched it fail on real footage — type that dissolves against a bright sky, a script whose vowel marks get clipped because the line box was measured for Latin, speech that switches language halfway through a sentence and has nowhere to go in an interface built around a dropdown.
Those are the things worth writing down, so that is what these posts are. Each one carries a number, a threshold or a specification we actually use, because a post that only describes a problem is an essay and a post that quotes the constant is something you can check, argue with, or borrow.
What you will not find here is a product announcement dressed as an article, a listicle of tips, or a claim we cannot show the workings for. Where we got something wrong — and the bright-footage post is mostly an account of getting it wrong for a while — the wrong version is described too, because the failed approach is usually the more useful half.
