Subtitle character counter
Check your captions against the 42-characters-per-line guideline in one paste.
Professional subtitle guidelines (Netflix's are the industry reference) keep each line at 42 characters or fewer so captions stay readable at a glance. Paste your SRT, VTT or plain text below: timestamps and cue numbers are ignored automatically, and you get line, word and character counts plus exactly how many lines break the rule.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Why 42 characters?
It's the line length most broadcast and streaming style guides converged on for comfortable reading speed on screen — Netflix's public style guide made it the de-facto standard. Some contexts use 37 (teletext heritage) or 47; 42 is the safe default.
Does it count timestamps and cue numbers?
No — lines containing '-->', bare cue numbers, and WEBVTT/NOTE/STYLE metadata are excluded, so the counts reflect only what viewers read.
What do I do with lines that are too long?
Split them at natural phrase boundaries — after punctuation or before conjunctions — into two lines or two cues. Never split names or number groups across lines.
Can Trustample generate compliant subtitles directly?
Trustample exports SRT/VTT from your transcript with sensible segment lengths; very long sentences can still exceed 42 characters, which this counter helps you catch before publishing.
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