Allow parentheses in transcripts!
shipped
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Dan
At some point, Descript added an "inline notes" feature, such that anything entered between (parentheses) in a transcript is treated as a "note".
This means it is not possible to actually use parentheses as punctuation marks in a transcript (in those cases where your subject makes a parenthetical remark, like this).
Yes, sometimes you can swap out parentheses for other punctuation like commas or em-dashes.
But what about when parentheses appear in the proper, official names of things, such as the 401 (k) retirement plan common in the U.S.?
This is extremely damaging to our workflow, and, while I assume you have stats telling you that only 0.1% of your customers use parentheses, they are a common form of punctuation mark, and we need a way to actually use them in transcripts!
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Support Team
Merged in a post:
Overdub option for reading text in parentheses or
Cindy Giovanetti
Currently Overdub does not read text inside parenthesis. It would be helpful to have a toggle to turn that off OR it would be helpful to have a way to remove all parenthesis.
Canny AI
Merged in a post:
Change the shortcut for inline notes
Mark Wade
I often need to include parentheses in transcripts but can't do because the bracket symbol is the shortcut for inline notes, is this an oversight that can be fixed?
Katrina Lui
shipped
This is currently possible using the text correction input (select the text you want to edit and then hit E).
K
Katherine Fedor
Katrina Lui: Oh, super great! I see now we can also do it with the search and replace tool (same thing I use for adding curly apostrophes and quotes and em dashes). Thank you!
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Bill Russell
Katrina Lui: Awesome, thanks!!!
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Katherine Fedor
Yes, please! Parens in captions.
B
Bill Russell
Yes!!! And em-dashes, please!!!
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Chris R
C'mon Descript.. Fix/adjust this already.
This may be a small request in your request forum but I can guarantee that there's a lot more people that have not taken the time to get to the point of signing-up to upvote this, or comment.
Simple fix = Allow parentheses and change the coding of your ( notes to some other key.
Elise Springer
And for that matter a real em-dash is also unusable. Many people use double-hyphens, but a real em-dash — like this — turns out to trigger some obscure keyboard command in Descript. Between this and lack of parens, I'm often flummoxed.
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Dan
Elise Springer: This is true. I've found that you can't enter an em-dash into Descript's text editor, but if you copy the character from elsewhere and PASTE it into the editor, it works. However, note that, if you export the transcript as RTF, the em-dash will export as a sequence of weird characters. 🙄
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Jason Eisner
Yes, please! I sometimes want parenthetical remarks in transcripts, too. It's possible to use [square brackets] or {curly braces} but it looks odd. One option would be for Descript to use of those rarer markings to indicate notes, and leave the more common parenthetical markings for general use in the transcript. (Though of course, it would be best to allow arbitrary Unicode in transcripts, and have some keyboard shortcut or right-click menu for notes.)
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Francesco Mosconi
Strongly needed
Patrick Frank 🎥
I'm having the same issue trying to include + in transcripts - it brings up the "add" dialogue!
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Dan
Patrick Frank 🎥: Seriously! A text editor has to ACCEPT STANDARD TEXTUAL SYMBOLS. New features need to be activated by OTHER factors, like modifier keys; that's what those keys are for.
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