Hi. I have code that uses the Zoom API to supply informative captions during a meeting. Each caption I send to the API contains up to three lines, separated by newline characters, e.g. “first line\nsecond line\nthird line”.
This system was built a couple of years ago. At the time, such a three-line caption was displayed all at once, showing three lines, which (like all captions) disappeared after about ten seconds. But at some point more recently the behavior changed; now I see a fast scroll through the first two lines, and only the third line is displayed long enough to read.
So: Is there some way of retrieving the old behavior, so that I can display up to three lines of caption together, all lines sticking around long enough to be readable?
Note: This question is similar to the one asked here. The response to that question redirects to the Technical Support Team at support.zoom.us, so I created a request at that site. The response I received directed me back here, to devforum.
It looks like we only support two lines of closed captions now. Unfortunately, we don’t have a setting to change this behavior.
However, you should be able to use a single newline character in a request as outlined here. Then, you can use a second request to send the third line.
Alas, not so well. I don’t have a good way of waiting, then sending another line—and it would be tricky to handle the case where that third line interferes with the next group of lines. I could do it if I felt strongly enough, but it’s not sufficiently critical. Instead, knowing the limitation, I’ll do what I can with two lines. I can get more than 2/3 the value with a little care. Maybe the situation will change soon.
In fact, your post helps. In my original post I said I could see one line, not two. That was because I was adding a final newline: “first\nsecond\nthird\n”. So I was seeing the third line followed by a blank line. By dropping that final newline I get two full lines, as you say. I can do much more with two lines than with one.
@peter3 I don’t know if I understand your question. \n is the end-of-line character and does signal a line break. So a caption like “abc\ndef” will display on two lines, the first containing “abc” and the second “def”.
My problem was that Zoom used to display three lines of caption, and now displays only two. I used to send captions like this: “first line\nsecond line\nthird line” but now if you do that you see only the second line and the third line; the first scrolls off. Does this answer your question?