Bilingual Caption Doctor

Import Arabic subtitles as UTF-8

Arabic text must be decoded with the encoding that produced the file. Reading legacy encoded bytes as UTF-8 can corrupt letters before any timing repair begins. Caption Doctor accepts valid UTF-8 and rejects invalid byte sequences rather than guessing an encoding.

Before import

Keep the original. In an editor that recognizes its encoding, save a separate UTF-8 copy. Import that copy and compare Arabic letters against the original. If replacement characters already appear in the text, re-saving that damaged text does not recover the missing information.

The bom fixture tests a UTF-8 byte-order mark, which is retained. The crlf and cr fixtures test different line endings. Select Normalize line endings to LF only when you want that explicit change. A no-change export retains the input text exactly.

File size and content limits

The initial limit is 2 MB, measured as UTF-8 bytes rather than a character count. Arabic characters can occupy more than one byte. Oversized files receive an error; this tool does not silently truncate them.

Subtitle text is displayed as text. The malicious fixture includes an HTML image element with an event handler; the browser must show its literal characters rather than load the image or execute the handler. This protects the inspection surface, but exporting the text does not sanitize it for every other program. Review unexpected markup in your intended editor.

Tested examples: arabic,bom,crlf,cr,multiline,malicious. Original synthetic fixtures maintained with the tool.