Problems with IPTC in Sweden

[miksjo]

Hi!

I´m having major problems with IPTC when transmittning my pictures trough PM 4.5.1.1 to the newspaper i work for.
My language is swedish, with the special letters Å, Ä and Ö, that gets corrupted. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
It is very unreliable and it´s causing me lot of trouble when the editors cant find the pictures using Openstore from www.icemanmedia.com, as the letters Å, Ä & Ö doesnt work properly.
If i open a picture in CS3 on my MacBook Pro the IPTC seems fine (with IPTC added from PM 4.5.1.1, on the same computer), but if i open the same picture in CS2 on one of the PowerMacs on the newspaper (without transmitting it by FTP, insted putting it on a CF-card), all IPTC-info will be useless, as the letters Å, Ä and Ö for some reason have been replaced with some stange symbols and letters.
Any suggestions?

Mikael Sjöberg

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[Kirk Baker]

Mikael,

I'm having major problems with IPTC when transmittning my pictures trough PM 4.5.1.1 to the newspaper i work for.
My language is swedish, with the special letters Å, Ä and Ö, that gets corrupted. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
It is very unreliable and it's causing me lot of trouble when the editors cant find the pictures using Openstore from www.icemanmedia.com, as the letters Å, Ä & Ö doesnt work properly.
If i open a picture in CS3 on my MacBook Pro the IPTC seems fine (with IPTC added from PM 4.5.1.1, on the same computer), but if i open the same picture in CS2 on one of the PowerMacs on the newspaper (without transmitting it by FTP, insted putting it on a CF-card), all IPTC-info will be useless, as the letters Å, Ä and Ö for some reason have been replaced with some stange symbols and letters.

In order for a single character like Ö to be replaced by more than one character indicates to me that at some point you saved the IPTC data out as Unicode (the UTF-8 encoding to be specific) and I know for certain that Photoshop CS 2 does not note that encoding properly and displays the UTF-8 data as if it were not Unicode at all.  I don't have CS3 so I don't know if it finally deals with UTF-8 IPTC data properly or not.

I would then have to guess that Openstore doesn't handle UTF-8 encoded IPTC either and is showing the UTF-8 characters directly instead of interpreting them as Unicode.  I went to their site and couldn't find out any information about what encoding they use, but their home page HTML does not specify an encoding at all and it has some of the characters you list on it.  I would think then that they use Latin1 as their encoding.

In order to help you I would like for you to send me the actual JPEG image that you showed in your examples so I can examine the IPTC data directly.  Please contact me directly for an email address you can send your image to.  Click on my name to the left of this message and send me a personal message.

-Kirk

[Kirk Baker]

Mikael,

I´m having major problems with IPTC when transmittning my pictures trough PM 4.5.1.1 to the newspaper i work for.
My language is swedish, with the special letters Å, Ä and Ö, that gets corrupted. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
It is very unreliable and it´s causing me lot of trouble when the editors cant find the pictures using Openstore from www.icemanmedia.com, as the letters Å, Ä & Ö doesnt work properly.
If i open a picture in CS3 on my MacBook Pro the IPTC seems fine (with IPTC added from PM 4.5.1.1, on the same computer), but if i open the same picture in CS2 on one of the PowerMacs on the newspaper (without transmitting it by FTP, insted putting it on a CF-card), all IPTC-info will be useless, as the letters Å, Ä and Ö for some reason have been replaced with some stange symbols and letters.

I got the file and looked into it.  The IPTC data is indeed saved in the Unicode (UTF-8) format.  So somewhere along the line of your workflow you saved the IPTC in the Unicode format and that is causing the problem for Openstore and CS2.  I'd expect that if you don't tell PM to save the IPTC data as Unicode, the problem will go away.

-Kirk

[miksjo]

Hi again,

So whay shall i do? The ”Save as unicode” box is supposed to be unchecked i guess.
But i dont really know wich Default IPTC encoding i need to use?

Best regards, Mikael Sjöberg

[Kirk Baker]

Mikael,

Hi again,

So whay shall i do? The ”Save as unicode” box is supposed to be unchecked i guess.
But i dont really know wich Default IPTC encoding i need to use?

You're just going to have to experiment to find out what encoding your customers are using and have PM use that encoding when saving IPTC.  I would just create several images each with a different encoding, and ask your customers to open each one up and tell you which one looked correct.

-Kirk