Handling Lines

You will soon realize that typesetting signs will create a lot of lines. Moving around in the subtitle file, navigating to exact lines as well as making specific selections will become harder and harder. In this page, let's go about how to do these.

Fold

Folding is a quite recent feature added to this fork of Aegisub to visually group and collapse lines in the subtitle grid called folds. When you have a lot of lines in your file, being able to group lines makes it easier to navigate and work on a specific sign. Not only you can group a single sign in a single fold but you can have sub-folds. For a specific sign, you can have a sub-fold for its mask and another sub-fold for its text for example.

I already explained when we learned about subtitle grid, that there is context menu for creating and clearing folds for a selection of lines in subtitle grid.

If creating and removing fold like above is enough for you, then there is no need to read further about folds. In this page, we will learn about a script called Fold Operation made by me which allows you to create, remove and perform various operations on the folds. It is available in Dependency Control so install it from there.

Note

Fold is currently not in the most robust state since it uses extradata to save folds. So either use the script for all fold related work or just use context menu. Don't mix them or they may lead to invalid fold states.

Before I explain the usage of this script, there are two popular ways I've noticed people use folds. One is to simply select all the lines and create folds and another is to add commented lines at the start and end of lines where the first line has name for the fold. These names are descriptive of the sign and since we only see the first line of a fold, this makes navigating and finding signs easier.

Fold with commentsSame fold without comments

I prefer to use comments around my fold since it is cleaner and instantly allows me to recognize the signs among the list of folds. The script has an operation that will allow you to easily create named folds with comments.

You can open the GUI of the script by going to Automation -> Fold Operations -> GUI

Warning

If you use comments around the lines as fold markers, enable Comments around fold in the GUI before you do anything. Any operation you do using the script will then ignore the first and last line of the fold.

All the items of the GUI is also available in the sub-menu itself.

Create a New Named Fold Around Selected Lines

If select lines, enable Create a new named fold around selected lines in the GUI and press OK button, a GUI will open where you will enter a name for the fold. Make sure that this name describes the sign uniquely so that you can recognize it later. The script will then insert commented lines with name and create a fold with selected lines.

The folder marker is optional. You can change it to any character you want or untick to disable it. If you have folds inside fold, it will show how deep the fold is nested before fold names.

Select Fold

This selects all the lines in fold. Then you can do whatever you do with selected lines. The best thing about this is that you don't have to open the fold to select all the lines in the fold. Even if you are already inside the fold, running this will select all the lines in the fold.

In the video above, without opening fold, I select all the lines in the fold and add blur to it.

Commenting Fold

Commenting and uncommenting all the lines in a fold can be done easily.

Operation	Description
Comment	Comments all the lines in fold. If a line was already commented before running this, the script remembers it.
Uncomment	Uncomments all lines in a fold If the script remembers that a line was commented before running Comment, those lines remain commented.
Comment or Uncomment Fold	Comment the lines of fold if it contains any uncommented lines, otherwise uncomment it all.
Toggle Comments	This toggles the comments inside the current fold. Any commented lines will become uncommented, and vice versa. If the fold was commented using Comment Fold, the state of the already commented folds is respected.

Removing Fold

Operation	Description
Delete	This deletes all the lines of fold along with the commented lines around it.
Clear	This removes the fold without removing the lines itself. If you use comments around the fold, it will remove that as well.

Cut, Copy and Paste Fold

Operation	Description
Copy fold	Copies all the lines in fold along with it's fold state and styles to system clipboard.
Cut fold	Copies all the lines in fold along with it's fold state and styles to system clipboard and deletes the fold.
Paste fold	Pastes all the lines in that was copied or cut using this script. The fold copied from one Aegisub window can be pasted in the same or different Aegisub window.

When you paste fold, if the file in another Aegisub window does not have styles of copied lines, those styles will also be added to new file.

Jump To

Another way of handling lot of lines is to quickly jump over large number of lines. The script used for this is called Jump To Next by unanimated. When you install it from Dependency Control, it will create two entries inside Automation: Jump To Next and Jump To Previous. Both of these have sub-menus:

1. Actor
2. Commented Lines
3. Effect
4. Layer
5. Style
6. Text

It means you can jump over lines that have same comment state, actor, effect, layer, style and text all at once and go above them or after them. If you find yourself using one of these more often, make sure to bind it to hotkey in subtitle grid. I use the text one a lot, allows me to jump over a sign easily since a single sign will have same text which is why I have bound the key j to Automation -> Jump to Next -> Text and the key Alt+j to Automation -> Jump to Previous -> Text.

There is also GUI in Automation -> Jump to Next -> _GUI if you want to use that instead but binding the ones you use often to hotkey will always be faster and more efficient.

Seletrix

TODO