Closed Captioning your files with CaptionSync allows you to submit your own formatted transcript. This article provides information about transcript rejection.
If you are getting an error message referring to words like Lucida or Helvetica which you don't see when you open your transcript in WordPad or TextEdit, the issue is most likely that your file is an RTF file but the extension was just changed to .TXT rather than saving it as a true .TXT file.
If you force TextEdit or WordPad to open the file as .TXT (otherwise TextEdit or WordPad will try to be smart and interprets this RTF information for display, but not print it on the screen), the extraneous content looks something like this:
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf360 {\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0TimesNewRomanPSMT; \f1\fnil\fcharset0LucidaGrande;\f2\fnil\fcharset0Calibri;} {\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} \margl1440\margr1440\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0\deftab720 \pard\pardeftab720\ri720\ql\qnatural \f0\fs24 \cf0 Hello my name is Christopher Kogan at University Park.
If TextEdit or WordPad opens it as an RTF, all you see is:
Hello my name is Christopher Kogan at University Park.
Worse would be if the text file was accepted without errors – then these characters would be scattered throughout the file and cause the synchronization problems (e.g. no audio corresponds to the \green255 text).
Rather than changing the extension from .RTF to .TXT, you need to convert the format properly. So, if you're on Windows, do File → Save as → Plain text document in WordPad:
On a Mac, open TextEdit and do Format → Make Plain Text:
Comments
2 comments
TextEdit doesn't allow files to be saved as TXT, also Apple has moved most of it's apps away from having a "Save As" function, rather they have "Duplicate" now. From what I see, the formats TextEdit can save in are as follows:
.rtf
.html
.webarchive
.odt
.docx
.xml
.doc
Would any of these work? Don't have access to Microsoft Word.
The RTF format needs to be effectively converted to TXT, so that it does not contain all the extra information in it. To do this, you need to open TextEdit and do Format → Make Plain Text. See the update above for more information.
TextEdit does allow for files to be saved as .txt, but you may need to hold down the "Option Key" for the menu to appear. Detailed instructions on how to save a file as TXT on TextEdit are available in our Character Encoding article.
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