IPTC / IPTC XMP character sets / encoding

[FVlcek]

Hello,

I am in need of some help with selecting proper character set for PM.

I just started working with a new newspaper which uses different publishing system for photos, and it got some problems from my captions (captioning in Czech which is Central European languages charset). However the system is outsourced so getting direct support from our IT staff is kinda difficult.

Especially on Mac at home. My PC laptop is now set for Microsoft Central Europe, and the accents are getting trough correctly. On the Mac, I tried to do the same (set as MS CE), but the characters are messed up.

I have following set:

IPTC only, no XMP (I have yet to know if they can accept XMP), MS CE on the Mac. All are jpegs.

The other photographers just use various versions of Photoshop to caption, but for me Photomechanic is essential to workflow and captioning, I can't even select photos without it anymore ;-)

The Photoshops are runnin on Windows XP Czech, which should use MS CE charpage I think (?). As there is no setting for encoding in Photoshop, I guess PS on PC uses the charpage of the machine it is running on. And that works.

My only problem is that this works in PM under Windows, with MS CE selected, but doesn't seem to be so on the Mac.

Testing this is kinda difficult, because all photos enter directly into the main archive.

I thought this might be problem with IPTC/XMP setting, as maybe on the Mac I had IPTC+XMP enabled (perhaps trough "add rating/colour class to photos..."?) and the newspaper's app picks up XMP while not recognising the codepage, but I dunno.

So what I need to know, at first, please, is what codepage is the default in Photoshop 7 and CS, running on Windows XP Czech (Central European, so same as Polish et cetera). I do not know if PS in that instance writes IPTC, IPTC/XMP or both.

I would just like to imitate the same with PM on Mac because the newspaper app worked with that fine. Getting them to accept proper XMP with Unicode would be probably pointless, most people writing these outsourced programs never adhere to any standards

Thanks for any help, Frantisek

[Kirk Baker]

Frantisek,

I am in need of some help with selecting proper character set for PM.

I just started working with a new newspaper which uses different publishing system for photos, and it got some problems from my captions (captioning in Czech which is Central European languages charset). However the system is outsourced so getting direct support from our IT staff is kinda difficult.

Especially on Mac at home. My PC laptop is now set for Microsoft Central Europe, and the accents are getting trough correctly. On the Mac, I tried to do the same (set as MS CE), but the characters are messed up.

I have following set:

IPTC only, no XMP (I have yet to know if they can accept XMP), MS CE on the Mac. All are jpegs.

The other photographers just use various versions of Photoshop to caption, but for me Photomechanic is essential to workflow and captioning, I can't even select photos without it anymore ;-)

The Photoshops are runnin on Windows XP Czech, which should use MS CE charpage I think (?). As there is no setting for encoding in Photoshop, I guess PS on PC uses the charpage of the machine it is running on. And that works.

My only problem is that this works in PM under Windows, with MS CE selected, but doesn't seem to be so on the Mac.

Testing this is kinda difficult, because all photos enter directly into the main archive.

I thought this might be problem with IPTC/XMP setting, as maybe on the Mac I had IPTC+XMP enabled (perhaps trough "add rating/colour class to photos..."?) and the newspaper's app picks up XMP while not recognising the codepage, but I dunno.

So what I need to know, at first, please, is what codepage is the default in Photoshop 7 and CS, running on Windows XP Czech (Central European, so same as Polish et cetera). I do not know if PS in that instance writes IPTC, IPTC/XMP or both.

I would just like to imitate the same with PM on Mac because the newspaper app worked with that fine. Getting them to accept proper XMP with Unicode would be probably pointless, most people writing these outsourced programs never adhere to any standards

Can you send me a sample JPEG or two with all the Czech characters you would normally use written into the IPTC Caption field, along with a screenshot from your Windows PC showing what the text should look like?  With that, I may be able to figure out what is going on.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[HPL]

Hi

In my Windows PM 4.5.2 I have set IPTC encoding to Microsoft Latin1+Euro and Unicode not checked.
This works fine for all German and Czech characters like ä, ö, ü and Ž.
At least my Capture NX will see it correctly.

BTW: my Windows XP is speaking US English...

Peter