Documentation:

The Gnome Subtitle Editor should be rather easy to use, navigate the menus and toolbar to find the different functions.

Actions

• Framerrate conversion

Use this tool if the subtitle is created for a file with another framerate than the one you have. If your subtitles appear at the wrong time, and this time delay increases throughout the movie (i.e. in the beginning of the movie, the text is delayed by 1 sec, and at the end it differs by 1 minute) then you have a sub with wrong framerate.
To find out what framerate a movie has, you can open it in mplayer and check the output in the terminal. Look for a line similar to

 VIDEO:  [DIV3]  640x304  24bpp  23.98 fps  636.7 kbps (77.7 kbyte/s)

• Frame displace

Use this tools if your subs appear to late or to early, but the time that differs does not change. You can specify how many frames to add or remove.
If the subtitle is of .srt format, then each time element will be converted to a frame according to the framerate specified in the main window. After the displacement, the values will be converted back again.

• Hearing impaired remove

This is used for subtitles which contains text like [laugh], [narrator] etc. It can also remove text that indicates singing (between @ signs)
Version 0.2 also support custom chars which enables you to specify a start char and end char that is used for hearing impaired

• Split file

This action will split the currently open file in two parts.
When selected, a dialog will pop up which ask you to select two filenames for the new subs. Gsubedit will try to guess a name according to the current open file.
You must also specify the row where the split will occur. The row entered will be the last line of file 1.

• Join files

This action is the opposite to split file and will ether join two files into one new or append a file to the one currently opened.
The frames/times in the second file will be increased by the number of the last line of the first file.

Example:

File one's last line ends on frame 12345 and file two's first line starts with 100 then the first line of the appended file will be 12445.

Spellchecker

The spellchecker is actually a front-end to ispell/Aspell. The advantage by using a central spellchecker is that any words saved in the personal dictionary will be available from other programs that makes use of ispell.

Before the ispell can run properly it needs to know the language of the subtitle. This can be done on a case-by-case basis where you enter the language-code every time you start the spell-checker, or you may enter your most frequently used languages in the preferences-window.

The language-code is the same as the iso standard names for country- and language-representation. A full list is available at: http://www.twics.com/~craig/writings/linux-nihongo/node93.html
The code can be specified either:

• Specifying only the languagecode: sv for Swedish, en for English etc.
• Specifying a combination of languagecode and country code: sv_SE for Swedish, en_US for US English.

When the spell-checker starts it will scan the file for misspelled words and present you with a list of suggestions. If the the correct spelling of the word isn't available in the list then enter the correct word in the entry 'Replace with' and press 'Replace'. It is always the word in this entry that is the replacement word.

If a word is actually correct spelled, then there are two options:

1. "Add word": Will add the word lowercased into the personal dictionary. You should use this most of the time.
2. "Add word with case": This will save the word, with the case, into the personal dictionary. This is intended for names where the case matters.

The ignore buttons will cause ispell to ignore the words this session, but the next time ispell is launched it will consider them misspelled.

The progress of the spell-checker is shown in the statusbar of the main window.