Convert Word to SRT

How to convert Word to SRT

1. Open your .docx file

   Drop a Word document into the box above, or click to browse. It’s unpacked and read by your browser and never uploaded.

2. Choose how the text becomes subtitles

   Pick “Line” to make each line of the document a subtitle, or “Paragraph” to keep lines that belong together on screen at once. Then choose reading time, or the same number of seconds for every subtitle.

3. Download the .srt file

   Check the subtitles and their times in the preview, then download. interview.docx becomes interview.srt.

Why scripts live in Word

Most subtitles start as words in a document. A translator delivers the dialogue in Word, a video producer writes a script, a journalist transcribes an interview, a teacher prepares the narration for a course. Word is where people write, comment and track changes, so that is the file that arrives when the video is ready.

A video player can’t read a .docx. It needs a subtitle file: each line numbered, with a start and end time. Copying hundreds of lines out of Word into a subtitle editor by hand is slow, and pasting into a text file often brings curly quotes, tabs and stray line breaks with it.

What is inside a .docx. A Word document is a ZIP archive of XML files. The text sits in word/document.xml, split into paragraphs and runs of formatting. This page opens the archive in your browser, takes the text of each paragraph in order and leaves out the rest: styles, comments, headers and footers, images and text deleted with Track Changes.

What the tool does with your document

Reads the paragraphs in order. Each paragraph of the document becomes a line of text, and table cells are read row by row. A line break inside a paragraph counts as a new line, and an empty paragraph separates blocks of text.

Cuts long lines at sentences. With “Line” selected, a line longer than two subtitle rows is cut at the end of a sentence, then at a comma, then between words. Each subtitle is wrapped onto at most two rows of 42 characters, the size most players and broadcast guidelines expect.

Times the subtitles. With reading time, each subtitle stays about one second for every 15 characters, at least 1.5 and at most 7 seconds, with a tenth of a second between subtitles so players never merge them. With “Same for all”, every subtitle stays the number of seconds you type.

Keeps subtitles that are already timed. A document that holds a pasted SRT or WebVTT file is read as subtitles, not as text. Its times are kept, the options step aside, and the result is a clean .srt.

Tips

Clean the document first. Delete the title page, scene headings and notes for the editor before converting, or delete those lines afterwards in the Subtitle Editor.

Sync after converting. The subtitles start at 0:00. If the first line is spoken at 0:12, shift the whole file by 12 seconds with Shift Subtitle Timing.

Need WebVTT for a web player or a course platform? Convert Word to VTT does the same and saves a .vtt file. Already have plain text? Convert TXT to SRT takes a .txt file.