Subtitles

[EcclesCake]

Is it normal for a pound sign to indicate singing/music on subtitles?

Are there any other characters used to indicate something that isn't speech?

[jennyjoan]

website of fsymbols.com - choose your musical sign control and copy then paste - hope it works for you ♪

[Buenchico]

OfCom provides guidance to broadcasters on the use of symbols (among other things) when subtitling programmes. Annoyingly, the relevant web page doesn't display properly in my browser (Firefox), so some of the actual symbols aren't present.

However, reading the text suggests that #, rather than £, should be appearing:
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/itc_publications/codes_guidance/standards_for_subtitling/subtitling_2.asp.html



SOUND EFFECTS (& THINGS LIKE LAUGHTER) SHOULD APPEAR LIKE THIS

'Voice-overs and other speech that's not directly on screen can be shown like this'

"Mechanically-produced speech, such as that from a radio, can appear like this"

[Buenchico]

I don't think that's what EC was asking about, Conne, but here's your missing link anyway:
http://fsymbols.com/

[EcclesCake]

Thanks Chris, I've been using subtitles a lot recently and was intrigued by the presence of a pound sign at the beginning of the text.

JJ, thanks for trying to help.

[TheChair]

The web page doesn't display properly in Chrome or IE11, either Buenchico, so I'd say the fault was with the site (which incidentally is using tables, so is probably extremely old).