# Line Breaking and CPS

<p class="callout info"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Note: This section is partially based on the </span>[**BBC Subtitle Guidelines**](https://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/forproducts/guides/subtitles/#Line-breaks).</p>

#### <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">CPS (Characters Per Second) </span>

> CPS measures the number of characters, including spaces and punctuation, that appear in subtitles per second.  
> - Amara

Characters per second is the scale of how readable text is in conjunction with reading speed. It determines whether or not there is enough time to read a certain subtitle line comfortably and without trouble. The simple objective is: low-ish CPS good, high CPS bad.

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</td></tr></tbody></table>

**The CPS column in Aegisub scales from white to red depending on how high it is. Red CPS signifies that it is already dangerously high.**

- <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Always </span>**keep it below 20**. If it’s higher than that, you should contact your PRs to reword the sentence.
- If your CPS is less than 5, this means the line has a lot of space to work with and you can split and break it down.
- 20 (absolute max 25) if it's a long line (like more than 3 words)
- 15 (absolute max 20) if it's a short line (like 3 words or less)
- **Theoretical maximum CPS is 25**<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> and this is for </span>**Book Readers**.

#### Line breaking (\\N or Shift + Enter)

- <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">An </span>**ideal line break**<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> will be at a piece of punctuation like a full stop, comma, or dash.</span>
- A line break should always be before a pronoun/name.
- Avoid splitting the following parts of speech:
    - article and noun (e.g. the + table; a + book)
    - preposition and following phrase (e.g. on + the table; in + a way; about + his life)
    - conjunction and following phrase/clause (e.g. and + those books; but + I went there)
    - pronoun and verb (e.g. he + is; they + will come; it + comes)
    - parts of a complex verb (e.g. have + eaten; will + have + been + doing)
- Make sure the line break is justified. This means that the subtitles’ margins should relatively be weighed the same.
    - <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">There are some exceptions to this, such as when a word you’ll be line breaking is too long, you should </span>**prefer it to be bottom-heavy**.

#### There should only be 1 line break.

No matter what, there should only be 2 lines stacked on top of each other. If a sentence is too long, break the sentence down and split it into multiple lines instead.

#### Collabs

<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">If the video has multiple speakers, </span>**the maximum lines stacked that should appear is 3**.

- <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">If there are only </span>**2 speakers**, The one who is the main speaker of the conversation will get a line break while the other does not.
- <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">If </span>**3 speakers**<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> are speaking on top of each other, they each only get 1 line. No line breaks.</span>

<p class="callout warning">**If there’s more than 3, good luck.**</p>