Ferail

A command-line tool that's useful for dividing the timing and the editing or translating of subtitle files. One .ass formatted file provides the timings, and any number of line-break separated plain-text scripts. Outputs Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ass) and WebVTT (.vtt) formats.

Requires Node.

Example

Take this .ass subtitle (only showing the relevant bit)

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:03.54,0:00:05.34,Default,,0,0,0,,This is the first line
Dialogue: 0,0:00:08.58,0:00:13.74,Default,,0,0,0,,This is the second line

And this script

Oh dear
What should I do?

The output will be

[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:03.54,0:00:05.34,Default,,0,0,0,,Oh dear
Dialogue: 0,0:00:08.58,0:00:13.74,Default,,0,0,0,,What should I do?

WEBVTT

0:00:03.540 --> 0:00:05.340
Oh dear

0:00:08.580 --> 0:00:13.740
What should I do?

Installation

Using Node, type into the command line:

npm install -g ferail

This will install the package globally, so you can access it anywhere.

Usage

ferail --times timed-subtitle.ass scripts/*.txt

The above command, given the following directory structure

timed-subtitle.ass
scripts/
  English.txt
  Japanese.txt
  Spanish.txt

Will save the following files in this structure

output/
  vtt/
    English.vtt
    Japanese.vtt
    Spanish.vtt
  ass/
    English.ass
    Japanese.ass
    Spanish.ass

The output folder is the default, but the location can be changed by specifying the --output <output-folder> option.