>Has anybody any experience with reading xml files encoded in UTF-8 format
>with non-western characters included ?
>
>I've developed a QuickTime interactive movie which reads subtitles for the
>movie from a xml file.
>
>My client asks me to provide support for Russian, Hebrew and a couple of
>other languages.
>
>In TextEdit al seems fine, but once loaded into QT all non-western
>characters display incorrectly.
>
>Would be a great help.
>
>
>--
>Jan Hameeuw
>Spinnbackbit
>Integrated Media Solutions
>ANTWERP - BELGIUM - EU
>email@hidden
___________________
Jan
You are going to need to tell the QT text track that the text
encoding is UTF-8. You might also want to specify a UTF-8 font.
LiveStagePro, which I use, though a great product, has no way of
specifying a text track's character encoding, you will have to do it
with QTPro, using the "textencoding" tag and importing a tagged text
file. There is very little to no documentation on this from Apple
outside of using textencoding:0 or textencoding:256, which are
macRoman and 16-bit unicode, respectively.
I placed a notice about this here not too long ago. The best (not to
mention only, but still quite good) response, was from Ryan
Francesconi. Ryan gives reference to an apple page of unicode
conversions in his response (which I've copied after my letter,
below), but I can't figure out what # code one would use for 8-bit
unicode or utf-8. There was another apple page with text encoding
codes I found a while back but I still wasn't able to import UTF-8
into a QT list.
One *could* create 16 bit unicode text tracks using a bin-hex editor
and import the tagged text into QTPRo, there is a bit of Apple
documention on this -- i've tried it, it's not easy because the tags
have to be in standard 8-bit asc-ii while the text in 16 bit unicode.
it's a lot of cutting and pasting and using text encoding converter
like "cyclone". Of course this could be automated but i know of no
application that does it as yet. BUT... I have found that you can NOT
import a QT list that has 16-bit character encoding -- QTlists do NOT
seem to handle 16bit unicode. I have submitted this as a QT bug to
apple... no word yet.
One thing that I have found you can do --
use non-western Mac fonts and their appropriate keyboards on your mac
to type in and synchronize your captions using LiveStagePro 4.0 (on
it's timeline stage), which is just out. Then "burn in" these tracks
so that you don't have to worry about mac users not having the fonts
installed or windows users -- these tracks are now essentially all
pictures, essentially little videos. You will want to watch and pause
the video first and write down your in points to make this process
faster, you'll also have to convert those times to 600/second
standard.
If you have a lot to do and it justifies your budget and your
client's needs, we are working on fast captioning tools -- and we can
customize one for you -- for creating synchronized caption tracks
into the non-western fonts of your choice (on a mac). A speaker of
the language watches the video, pausing to mark in points and to type
in the captions using the appropriate keyboard. This will create a
database of time-in and time-out points as well as the captions. Our
"builder" software can then convert this database into child caption
track QT movies, with burned-in text, that your main video can bring
in as needed, or you can hardwire them into the project. (Or
alternately we convert the database into QT lists or xml for Flash,
or convert the text to iso encodings for use of the database by other
applications, or create machine translations into other languages --
the database can be retained for future use in all kinds of ways --
including captioning windows and Real Player and using .smil, if the
process can handle the encoding you've chosen or one we can convert
into.)
Another option, which I don't have a lot of experience with --
FlashMX is now said to be totally unicode compliant and now supports
video, and you can dynamically bring in the captions as text files.
IMHO, Apple should have scuttled MacRoman (except for legacy support)
with OS X and joined the rest of the world in iso-8859, with an eye
on UTF-8 and then full 16-bit Unicode in the not-too-distant future.
MacRoman default is holding QT back in the "global village" and in
multilingual applications.
John DuQuette
Yabla, Inc.
www.yabla.com
(212) 226 2370
PS Here it is Ryan's response to me:
From: "Ryan Francesconi" <email@hidden>
To: <email@hidden>
i've never stuck unicode in a QTlist - though i have put it in a QTText file
as well as pasting unicode text with Wired Actions. My experience with that
indicated that QuickTime has incomplete/broken support of unicode. It was
missing some characters in the simplified chinese set. However, i didn't
veryify that or file a bug. I simply found another alternative that didn't
involve text tracks.
you need to have the unicode header in your text for QT to know that it's
unicode.
here are the other encodings - there are constants for both utf-8 and iso...
:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/TextIntlSvcs/TextEncodingConversionManager/TEC1.5/TEC.1a.html
good lucks, rf
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 18:08:57 -0400
To: <email@hidden>
From: John DuQuette <email@hidden>
Subject: unicode / text encoding & QT
Does anyone have good examples of a QT application utilizing 16-bit
unicode in a QT text track?
Is there a textencoding code setting for utf-8 or iso-8859-1?
I only know of textencoding value "256" for unicode (and 0 for
default macroman) and have seen no examples of unicode actually in
use.
Has anyone ever successfully stored unicode text in a QT list? Passed
unicode text from a QTlist to a unicode encoded text track for
display?
john
>
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