Character problem and Videostudio 11+

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 7:50 am

One thing I can see as a potential problem with my installation, and the missing danish characters, is that my Vista is an english version. I can't stand working in a danish OS at home, when we are using english ones at work. Of course my regional settings are all set up for danish.

In VS, I can't use any of the three danish characters: Æ Ø Å (and I am a little curious to see if I can post them at this board).
Several other special characters work fine in VS, like Ä Ö Ü Ê Ã É È and many others. Actually all characters where I first have to type in a modifier, like ¨ ^ or ~, and then the letter, are the ones that works.

The three danish ones are not obtained by doing this. They have their own dedicated keys on our keyboards, and in VS they are translated to something completely different.

EDIT: Sorry, it would appear that I can't write those characters here on the board, neither from work nor from home.

weaver · Post by **weaver** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 4:04 pm

sjj1805 wrote:It is not a VideoStudio problem.
From this it follows that the problem being encountered with these titles in VideoStudio will also be related to that individual computer and not the VideoStudio software. What we need to try and determine is what is that setting.

I dissagree with you.

My computer works in 6 languages with all character sets and all character sets are perfectly working in MS OFFICE applications and also in Movie Maker and some other video editors.
I can also use those characters in some other WEB forum like this one (PHP based). This means that the code generated by my PC is correct and other programs understand this. It looks like that somewhere the character byte is shortened and they loose the additional information describing the foreign origin of the code. (Those foreign characters are *not* described in standard ASCII character sets!)

Those character sets are not working in COREL applications and also not in ULEAD Video Studio. Some of the foreign characters work well in COOl 3D (the same character on the same computer does not work in VS.

I already contacted many time the HELP DESK and their answer was a simple NO, ULEAD does not support foreign languages.

Of course I would like to know what tricky set-up is required to make those programs working.

(On some of my computers I use US W XP on others I use the German version of the W XP, this does not influences at all the performance of the ULEAD VS)

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:56 pm

I just got the definitive proof that it isn't the operating system, or the settings therein. I started my old XP machine and tried to make a title in VS11+ on that one. As expected it fails just as on my new computer. But then I tried VS9, and here it WORKS !!! All danish characters appear without a hitch. See this screenshot:

http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/vs9-chars.jpg

I will now see if I can find the character sets used by VS9. If I am lucky, I just might be able to replace the fonts in VS11+ with the working ones from VS9. Or is this just a waste of time?

Edit:
No such luck. It seems to be using the Windows fonts, which is the most sensible thing to do anyway.
But I have been playing a bit with the Windows tool "Character Map". And it seems that VS11+ uses a subset of the fonts, called "Central Europe". This gives exactly the wrong characters I see instead of the danish ones.

Perhaps it is possible to create modified copies of the font files, where the "Central Europe" characters has been replaced with the "Western" characterset. And then just use these modified fonts in VS. Does anyone have a font editor, and like to give it a try?

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:23 pm

Modifying a font really works. I downloaded a demo of FontCreator http://www.high-logic.com/ and played around with the Times New Roman font.
And after a few attempts of modifying the glyph mapping, I have succeeded. I now have a modified font, which I call "VS Times New Roman". And if I use this font in VS, everything works. In this screenshot I have used the standard font at the top, and the modified one below:

http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/vs11-newfont.jpg

However, this is a lot of work so I'll only do it with a couple of the most standard fonts, and then hope Ulead will fix this font problem in a patch.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 11:40 pm

So in a nutshell the reason it works on my Home computer and not the Work Computer is down to Font Substitutes!

You can check what Font substitutes you have in the Registery
[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes] key.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 12:32 am

I confess to total ignorance on this point. How are these substitutes created in this Forum and VS contexts?

I have about 20 font substitutes listed in that Registry key. Yet I don't have any Font Explorer-type programs installed on this computer, nor have I done anything special with the language sets...

I know Windows will use a substitute font in other situations where it cannot find the exact font designated. But I presume I am using a standard font on this forum, just as I seem to be able to use a variety of fonts in VS and still produce those foreign language letters.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 12:57 am

I did a Google search and apparently this problem is quite common across a wide range of computer related problems - ranging from user to user forums, Software and Computer languages.

Google Search - problem with foreign Characters

After much reading I found that often it is the font substitution set up of the users computer. I was intrigued why I could type À È Í Ò Ý and so on from home and the forum happily accepted it. Doing the same at work resulted in these characters appearing in the [Post a reply] dialog box, but as soon as I hit the [Submit] button they changed.

It seems from Svuppe's post that VS9 handles font substitutions differently from VS11.

So basically it is a mixture of the Users own computer and the VideoStudio program.

weaver · Post by **weaver** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:15 am

Svuppe wrote:Modifying a font really works. I downloaded a demo of FontCreator http://www.high-logic.com/ and played around with the Times New Roman font.
And after a few attempts of modifying the glyph mapping, I have succeeded. I now have a modified font, which I call "VS Times New Roman". And if I use this font in VS, everything works. In this screenshot I have used the standard font at the top, and the modified one below:

http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/vs11-newfont.jpg

However, this is a lot of work so I'll only do it with a couple of the most standard fonts, and then hope Ulead will fix this font problem in a patch.

How did you make those new characters? Did you replace some non frequent basic ASCII characters with the new ones or did you add the new characters to the original ones? What are the keystrokes to get those letters?

I have many fonts (Central and Western European, including Danish) where those characters exist in MS etc. applications but VS simple ignores them.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:22 am

Svuppe wrote:Modifying a font really works. I downloaded a demo of FontCreator http://www.high-logic.com/ and played around with the Times New Roman font.
And after a few attempts of modifying the glyph mapping, I have succeeded. I now have a modified font, which I call "VS Times New Roman". And if I use this font in VS, everything works. In this screenshot I have used the standard font at the top, and the modified one below:

http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/vs11-newfont.jpg

However, this is a lot of work so I'll only do it with a couple of the most standard fonts, and then hope Ulead will fix this font problem in a patch.

How about making it available for download?
Seems a pity to go to that much work and not share it.

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 6:19 am

sjj1805 wrote:How about making it available for download?
Seems a pity to go to that much work and not share it.

I did consider that, but decided against it for two reasons:
First: I only made this font for the danish characters. It should support the entire Western charset (Latin-1) if it is to be used by others.
And second: I modified a built-in Windows font, and as such it most probably is soaked in copyrights, and distributing it (and even worse modified) doesn't sound like a good idea in my head.
However, if we can find a good and nice-looking freeware font, where modifying and redistributing is allowed, I would gladly modify it.

And now for the font substitution. I did have a long look at that before I started to actually modify a font. And my conclusion is that font substitution is only used to help really old win-programs (Win 3.1), which do not have unicode support. It is a way to take a subset of a (unicode) font, and make it available as a virtual new font (with only 256 characters). On my machine, these fonts are named "Arial CE", "Arial Greek", "Courier New Baltic" and so on. And as these regional fonts doesn't show up in VS, VS uses the full unicode fonts, and the font substitution does nothing.

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 7:32 am

weaver wrote:How did you make those new characters? Did you replace some non frequent basic ASCII characters with the new ones or did you add the new characters to the original ones? What are the keystrokes to get those letters?

I didn't make new characters at all, as they already are in the font file. Instead, I changed the mapping of some of the Latin-2 (central europe) characters to the desired Latin-1 (western). The danish (and many other) characters resides in the Latin-1 subset of a font, but VS11 seem to be using Latin-2, despite my Windows locale setting has been set to danish. So I make a font, where some of the Latin-2 characters map into the graphic elements (glyphs) of Latin-1.
The downside of this, is that an original central european text displayed with this font, will now display weird stuff with danish characters all over it. But that is why I made a new font called VS*****, so I'll only use it in VS.

And the keystrokes used to get them in VS, are simply the usual ones. No copy/paste or other tricks. Couldn't be simpler.

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 12:06 pm

I have now found a freeware font, which doesn't look too bad, and I have tried to do a complete western character mapping in it. However, I haven't tested it at all, as I don't have VS installed at work. If you'd like to try it, then get it here:
http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/day_roman_vs.zip

Just install the .ttf file (copy to c:\windows\fonts in XP or right click->install in Vista).. Then start VS and use the font "Day Roman" to make your titles.
I will test it myself tonight, but please let me know if it works in your language.

micononos · Post by **micononos** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:14 pm

Svuppe wrote:I have now found a freeware font, which doesn't look too bad, and I have tried to do a complete western character mapping in it. However, I haven't tested it at all, as I don't have VS installed at work. If you'd like to try it, then get it here:
http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/day_roman_vs.zip

Just install the .ttf file (copy to c:\windows\fonts in XP or right click->install in Vista).. Then start VS and use the font "Day Roman" to make your titles.
I will test it myself tonight, but please let me know if it works in your language.

Hi all
I'm a bit Newbie so, sorry if you already tried this .
I found this program and ,may be.. it can help you .
http://allchars.zwolnet.com/download/program.html
It is working for XP " å " is possible now for me and my french keyboard.
i'll verify soon with vista .

micononos · Post by **micononos** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:32 pm

Infortunatly , it's not working with vista ..

But the problem is different because with XP i have all frenchs characters of my keyboard but with another computer with vista i don't have some of them ..
I think it's really a bug of VS Vista version .

However Allchars may help some body with XP because now i have some danish characters but may be not all of them .

Svuppe · Post by **Svuppe** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:10 pm

Svuppe wrote:If you'd like to try it, then get it here:
http://www.ejberg.dk/temp/day_roman_vs.zip
Just install the .ttf file (copy to c:\windows\fonts in XP or right click->install in Vista).. Then start VS and use the font "Day Roman" to make your titles.

I have now tested it, and it didn't work. The font wasn't ready to serve the Latin-2 codepage (and I have yet to learn a lot about fonts). I have fixed it and re-uploaded the file, so now it should work somewhat better.
I also changed the font name to "VS Day Roman", to indicate that this is a special and modified font for VS.

Alludo USER to USER Web Board

Character problem and Videostudio 11+

RE: characters