Hi

I work on a bilingual show where we subtitle a lot of the dialogue. We use a lot of characters with macrons over them. On previous series we did all our subtitling with the title tool, using alt+0XXX shortcuts to insert the macronised characters.

Now with MC3.0 we are trying a specialised subtitling programme that lets our translators do the work without taking up edit suite time and exporting an Avid DS subtitle file that is imported with the subcap generator.

Trouble is a lot of the macron characters don't work now. The alt+0XXX shortcuts don't work. Copying and pasting from the Windows Character Map doesn't work (it comes up with a "?")

From previous experiments I worked out that the title tool only recognises the first, maybe, 512 characters in a font, any characters that come after that in the Unicode set can't be used. Does this make sense to anyone? Can anyone give me an explanation as to what sort of font the SubCap generator uses and why it won't recognise special characters that every other programme in Windows does?

Thanks in advance.

Campbell

Don't know the reason, but if you need to work around this, check out Belle Nuit's Subtitler.

Yes, Belle Nuit is great. That's the program we use to generate the subtitle list. But rather than use Belle Nuit to generate graphics files and edit them onto a timeline (which is quite time consuming when you're doing it a lot, and corrections/re-edits require a lot of work to change), we want to use the SubCap generator.

SubCap generator is fantastic except for the problem I'm having (and also the fact that you can't apply fades, which would be a neat feature..)

It is actually only happening on some of the macron characters. When I import the subtitle list into the Sub Cap effect all the macron characters turn to gibberish. Some of them I can re-type in the effect window using the alt+0XXX short-cuts (but while the appear correctly on-screen, in the effect editor they are a gibberish of other characters e.g. &!%@ - which may be a clue to someone who understands these things).

But some can't be re-created. It's as though those characters aren't being read by Avid, even though they are in the font and other programmes can display them properly. If I try and copy-paste them in I just get a "?" and maybe a pound-sign on-screen.

This is very frustrating, why can't Avid (and this includes the title tool, although it is somewhat better) display all of the characters in a font???

 Hi

I think you can import text if it saved as UNICODE.

How do you genreate your file that you import to SubCap?

I have just tried to save some titles in SUBTITLEWORKSHOP 4 that can export EBU (STL files) that should work with SubCap, but I am having a problem to import that.

Yes I had trouble importing an stl file - i think I read somewhere that there are different standards for them so that may be the issue. Belle Nuit Subtitler cnan also export an Avid DS subtitle list which works.

I'll try making sure the text is saved as Unicode, but I think it already is.

dor

i've been away for a few weeks but thanks to you i've just solved all my issues! unicode was the problem - i had to open the Avid DS subtitle file that Belle Nuit created in Text Edit and resave it in the unicode format (the STL files wouldn't work - I think there are several different standards for that file format)

Avid read the unicode text correctly!

I had a few other issues relating to the font I used (it was one I had modified...) but I changed back to a standard font and the macron characters (which the Title Tool can't read) turned up perfectly.

Now if only you could have an outline on the text...the SubCap generator would be perfect!

cheers

Campbell