As long as you have the font on your computer, Vegas can use it for titles which is the way I'd do this. Drop a "default text" box on the timeline for each sentence in the document. No need to re-type as you can do a copy/paste from the word document into the text creation tab. A semi-transparent box can be added behind the titles if desired.

Mike

Well, you've got several obstacles but I think they can all be overcome.

What I'm hearing is that you need to place titles in your Vegas program as if they were subtitles. You need to do this in an Arabic typeface which will probably be unicode. You would probably like to be able to automate this in some way, like importing a subtitle file and somehow converting it to text media objects on your timeline.

I was able to cut and paste some characters in a Chinese typeface into Vegas 6C. That much works, as far as Vegas being able to use unicode. I'd ask your translator for some sample text for you to experiment with.

So the real question is how to make the job easy. It looks like you could just cut and paste lines of text into Vegas but it would be nice to automate it.

You should search this forum on that topic. My guess is that you'd want to have the subtitles in a *.sub format suitable for DVDa and then use a script to import it into Vegas instead. I know you can do this and make labeled markers or regions but I don't think you can automate the creatin of text events. Too bad, but you'd at least have the subtitle markers there on the timeline for reference.

Rob Mack

Thank you all for the information you've contributed! Its much appreciated. I have made some progress on this issue, but it is not completely resolved yet.

Arabic is read right-to-left (unlike English which of course is left-to-right). In order to get Arabic text to properly display, I had to make a small modification in Windows. On my Windows XP control panel, I set the region preferences to also allow right-to-left language support, and now I can copy and past Arabic text into Word. I can also successfully past it into Vega's titling window (i.e. the Video Media Generator) and it displays perfectly there. I thought the problem was solved!

Here's the new problem. When I close the titling window after entering the Arabic text, the generated overlay shows the text backwords. I mean the characters are correct, but they show up left-to-right instead of right-to-left.

If that's confusing, its like entering "Hi There" in the Video Media Generator and then seeing "erehT iH" in the rendered video.

Anyone have any ideas on correcting this?

if it's showing up in reverse, can you pan/crop-flip it?

From memory Arabic is a typesetting nightmare. The characters run right to left but the number are still left to right. I also seem to recall reading an article on just how difficult it was to typeset correctly, using old style linotype systems yielded newspapers that were unreadable by the many Arabs, something to do with how the characters were joined and the shape being influenced by characters several characters either side.
All this is just a fuzzy recollection from the dim past but if I'm right maybe you could truly impress your Arabic audience by having a scribe write the text and scan it.
Bob.

Unless you can read Arabic, this might be a job best done by a subcontractor. After all, you might be reinventing a difficult to make wheel that someone else is doing on a regualr basis.

Vegas does not currently support right-to-left languages in the titler, nor does it support ligatures. Both are required for the proper display of Arabic text. We would advise the use of a tool such as Photoshop for the creation of subtitles in this case.