# Bengali captions that are spelled right

> Bengali vowel signs like ি and ে are drawn before the consonant they follow. Most caption burners skip that step and spell the words wrong. Nova shapes them properly.

*For Bengali Creators*

Canonical: https://novaclipper.com/for/bengali-video-clips

Paste a Bengali video and get vertical clips with captions a Bengali reader can read. ি and ে are stored after their consonant and must be drawn before it — a step most short-form tools skip, because the filter they burn through cannot do it.

## What you get

### Measured, not asserted

We rendered the same Bengali sentence with and without proper shaping and compared the pixels: 14 times more divergence than a Latin control line, which shifts only by kerning. The glyphs move, not just the spacing.

### The font is not the fix

Installing a font with Bengali coverage is necessary and insufficient — the glyphs are already present and correctly drawn, and still in the wrong order. Shaping is a separate step from coverage.

### The whole clip, not a subtitle track

Moments found from the transcript, cropped vertical, hook written, captions burned word-by-word.

## FAQ

### Why are my Bengali captions misspelled?

Most likely the burn, not the transcription. FFmpeg's `subtitles` filter exposes no shaping option, so it renders without HarfBuzz — and Bengali pre-base vowel signs (ি, ে, ৈ) are stored after their consonant and must be drawn before it. Reported to libass as issue #682 in February 2023, closed as 'not our bug', still unfixed in FFmpeg. Look at any word with ি and check which side of the letter it is on.

### Which other languages does this affect?

Every script that reorders glyphs while shaping. We measured twelve: Tamil, Khmer, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, Telugu, Odia, Marathi and Thai, all diverging 5 to 19 times more than a Latin control.

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