A caption is a concise and descriptive bit of text that labels a picture, a comic strip, or a chart in a publication.

Captions on Television and Radio

Captions or subtitles appear in film, and in broadcast television and other video programs. Captions are used for purposes which include:

Closed captions are now broadcast or otherwise available in most television programs. They are transmitted with the vertical blanking interval of a television signal, and are automatically decoded by the television receiver. Open captions are permanently embedded into the picture, such as subtitles in foreign films.

There are three methods of captioning in film and television.

  • Roll-Up: The words appear from the left corner, one at a time, and when a line is filled the whole line scrolls up to make way for a new line, and the line on top is erased. The captions usually appear at the bottom of the screen. This method is used for live events, where a sequential word-by-word captioning process is needed.

  • Pop-Up: The caption would appear anywhere on the screen as a whole. The caption that preceded would be removed from the screen. This method is used for most pre-taped television and film programming.

  • Paint-On: The caption, whether it be a single word or a line, would appear on the screen but unlike pop-up, the previous caption may not be removed from the screen before the new caption is ‘painted on’ to the screen.

Electronic caption text inludes the symbols '>>' to indicate a new speaker, and '>>>' in news reports to identify a new story. Capitals are used because there is reported to be no descenders for lowercase i, j, g, q, and y (i.e. they would be hard to read because they would be put on a line used by other letters). Text can be italicized; in fact the FCC standard requires that text meant to be in italics be rendered that way on television displays.

The caption of a lawsuit or other legal document refers to that portion of the document containing the names of the parties and the case number.