Strange Õ symbol appearing in captions

[Matt London]

Hello,

Our editors in the office have a problem where a Õ is appearing in photographers' captions instead of the apostrophe symbol '

This problem only occurs when you copy and paste a few words of text from a website and if one of those copied words contains an apostrophe then when the picture arrives in the office the apostrophe will have been replaced with the Õ symbol.  If you type an apostrophe symbol ' it will still appear as an apostrophe ' it only changes when copied and pasted from a website.

The problem for us photographers is that when we copy words containing an apostrophe into our captions in photo mechanic, they still appear as normal apostrophes not as the strange Õ symbol - they only change to Õ once our editors look at the captions in the office.

Do you think it is a photo mechanic problem or a problem with the software in our office? If needed I can give you details of our software by PM as it is something our company has designed in house.

Many thanks in advance,

Matt

[Kirk Baker]

Matt,

Our editors in the office have a problem where a Õ is appearing in photographers' captions instead of the apostrophe symbol '

This problem only occurs when you copy and paste a few words of text from a website and if one of those copied words contains an apostrophe then when the picture arrives in the office the apostrophe will have been replaced with the Õ symbol.  If you type an apostrophe symbol ' it will still appear as an apostrophe ' it only changes when copied and pasted from a website.

The problem for us photographers is that when we copy words containing an apostrophe into our captions in photo mechanic, they still appear as normal apostrophes not as the strange Õ symbol - they only change to Õ once our editors look at the captions in the office.

Do you think it is a photo mechanic problem or a problem with the software in our office? If needed I can give you details of our software by PM as it is something our company has designed in house.

It's hard to tell where the problem lies without having a sample file.  Can you get me a sample image that has been captioned so I can take a look at it?  Please click on my name to the left of this message, then click on the 'personal message' link.  I will respond with upload instructions.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[Hayo Baan]

Looks like an IPTC encoding mismatch to me. I guess the website uses a different character code for the apostrophe; both ' and ’ are used and show up differently using different fonts. The first one is a "normal" ASCII character which has the same character code in almost all encodings, the latter actually is encoded differently depending on the encoding (e.g., Mac, Windows Latin 1, etc.)

Note: this only holds true for IPTC embedded info, not for XMP info as that always uses UTF-8 encoding and hence has no encoding problems.

Cheers,
    Hayo

[Kirk Baker]

Matt,

Our editors in the office have a problem where a Õ is appearing in photographers' captions instead of the apostrophe symbol '

This problem only occurs when you copy and paste a few words of text from a website and if one of those copied words contains an apostrophe then when the picture arrives in the office the apostrophe will have been replaced with the Õ symbol.  If you type an apostrophe symbol ' it will still appear as an apostrophe ' it only changes when copied and pasted from a website.

The problem for us photographers is that when we copy words containing an apostrophe into our captions in photo mechanic, they still appear as normal apostrophes not as the strange Õ symbol - they only change to Õ once our editors look at the captions in the office.

Do you think it is a photo mechanic problem or a problem with the software in our office? If needed I can give you details of our software by PM as it is something our company has designed in house.

I received and reviewed your sample file.  The apostrophe symbol that ends up being entered in the word "Ripley’s" is not the usual apostrophe character that you type on your keyboard, but is a special character with the value 0xD5 (213) in the Mac Roman character set.  Since IPTC doesn't in general specify a character encoding, everything above the standard 7-bit ASCII character set is considered unspecified.  The software your organization is using must interpret IPTC data in an encoding other than Mac Roman thus the character comes out as Õ.  I suspect that they use ISO-8859-1 (Western Latin) which you can choose as your encoding in Photo Mechanic.  If you change your 'Default IPTC Encoding:' to 'Latin1 Western European' then you'll be using the same encoding that your system uses to interpret IPTC data.  Unfortunately since the text fields themselves are Unicode aware, they have no problem showing the characters the way they should look, no matter what encoding you choose.  But if you save and advance to the next photo and then immediately return to the saved photo, you should then see any errors.

I hope this helps explain things and helps you find a way to deal with this unfortunate situation.

In the future, I hope your company software is updated to handle XMP data which has no issues representing these special "apostrophe" characters.

-Kirk

[Matt London]

Thanks Kirk and Hayo, that's fantastic!

I don't have a technical understanding of how character encoding works, so thanks for explaining, changing to Latin1 Western European completely fixes the problem.

I will find out who develops our office editing software and let them know for the next update...

Many thanks

Matt