Photo Mechanic > Support
Some Problems with Special Charakters
thuter:
Hi There,
We noticed some Problems with the german special characters like ä, ö, ü, ß
If we use them in iptc info and read them in other programms (photoshop, fotostation, exifreader - like the most newspapers do) the will shown as:
ä = Š
ö = š
ü = Ÿ
ß = §
Its a local problem for us in germany, but i think other europeans like french, sweden or danmark will have the same problems with their special charakters like the french " ê " for example - that becomes a " ?"
Kirk Baker:
--- Quote from: thuter on May 16, 2006, 05:22:24 AM ---We noticed some Problems with the german special characters like ä, ö, ü, ß
If we use them in iptc info and read them in other programms (photoshop, fotostation, exifreader - like the most newspapers do) the will shown as:
ä = Š
ö = š
ü = Ÿ
ß = §
Its a local problem for us in germany, but i think other europeans like french, sweden or danmark will have the same problems with their special charakters like the french " ê " for example - that becomes a " ?"
--- End quote ---
IPTC specifies character encoding to be defined by the ISO 2022 standard which is IMHO the most convoluted standard for specifying character sets/encodings. It is so complex that basically nobody implements it. The one encoding I have seen used is the Unicode (UTF-8) which in ISO 2022 format is specified by ESC%G. I have seen no other encodings.
Programs like Photoshop just put the text you enter into their Image Info dialog into IPTC as is. So on my Windows PC the Euro symbol is 0x80, but on my Macintosh it is 0xDB. Now when I open an image captioned on the opposite platform with the Euro in it, why does it look correct? Because Photoshop now writes out an XMP record as well as an IPTC record and XMP specifies its text in UTF-8. Photoshop prefers the XMP record if it exists over that of the IPTC record. The UTF-8 character stream for the Euro character is 0xE2 0x82 on all platforms, regardless of locale.
Photo Mechanic writes out IPTC characters in MacRoman which is what most of our customers use. We do that on both Mac OS X and Windows because for people who choose to use IPTC only this provides the capability for IPTC to be shared among Windows and Mac users. We used to do what Photoshop did, but that made users of Photo Mechanic discouraged to find that when they captioned on their PC and went to a Mac and viewed it then the characters were wrong. We decided that since there was no de-facto standard for character encoding we went with what was the most popular encoding at that time: MacRoman.
Photo Mechanic writes out properly encoded UTF-8 in its XMP records. So if you want maximum compatibility, use XMP. It is the direction that the industry is headed. IPTC is obsolete, and even the IPTC folks know this and that is why they have created IPTC4XMP.
So these other apps that you describe will hopefully be upgraded to use XMP, because not only can XMP support western/roman languages, it can support *all* languages. If you can configure these other apps like Fotostation to use XMP, all will be well. If they do not yet support XMP then hopefully they will in the future.
-Kirk
thuter:
It's not my problem - it's the problem of our customers. It's not easy to convince a international company changing their software cause we use PM ...
So for now it seems to be the only solution to change the programm... ???
Kirk Baker:
--- Quote from: thuter on May 16, 2006, 11:01:58 AM ---It's not my problem - it's the problem of our customers. It's not easy to convince a international company changing their software cause we use PM ...
So for now it seems to be the only solution to change the programm... ???
--- End quote ---
Why can't they use XMP? It is the only true international standard. If we went and just put in the characters from the encoding on your system then it would be no more interoperable outside your country than anything else.
Are companies just afraid of XMP? I don't see why. Adobe gives out a free SDK with source code to anyone who wants it. And it is quite easy to use. XMP is the future. IPTC is the present but will fade away over time.
Future versions of PM will let users type in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and any roman-based languages, all through XMP.
-Kirk
soren steffen:
I totally agree with Kirk. Why can't Fotostation use XMP ?
And why don't developers agree on standards for color labelling and rating so I can have my colorlabels and ratings follow the file or synchronize them?
:'(
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