Yes, I should get an Em dash (the longer) by typing Alt+0151 and an En dash (the shorter) by Alt+0150. However, none of these two work in Vegas. Nothing, not even a space shows up – though other special characters work just fine. Also, En dash and Em dash work in other applications I use, so it doesn't seem to be a Windows/system issue.

Håkan,
my Finnish keyboard responds to Alt+0150 and Alt+0151 giving me just those special characters in Titles&Text (Vegas Pro and Movie Studio tested in Win7, Movie Studio in XP). And Alt+134 even gives the a with a ring.
Maybe something in the settings? Reports of some font issues in Titles&Text though as well.
"Character map" as a workaround?

Ok, thanks for the info. I guess it's a local system problem then.

Alt+134 works here to. Initially, the En/Em dash are shown while typing in the typing window, but they are not showing in the video preview window. They are then replaced by minus signs.

/Håkan

Yes, it seems we need to go with the Character map after all. Preview not showing them consistently here either.

I have found EM and EN dashes work/show for me, depending on which font I am using.

A workaround (somewhat). For En/Em dash I use arial.ttf and Alt+9472 embeded in the other text. A litle too big as En dash but resizing it makes it fit ok I think.

Character mapping is peculiar to the Windows OS version you are using...no one probably ever told you that before.

Those are Windows-1252 characters, which are a PITA because Microsoft never bothered to follow the rules when they dumped the charset on the world.

That said, here is a complete list of all the illegal characters, and all their equivalents. It's in a Perl sub I wrote several years ago to validate RSS correctly for syndication.

 # Replaces windows-1252 (MS Word) characters with their Unicode equivalents

   # Compatibile with feeds server-declared as UTF-8

    sub preserve1252 {

    my $string = shift;

    $string =~ s/\x80|€|€/€/g;

    $string =~ s/\x82|‚|‚/‚/g;

    $string =~ s/\x83|ƒ|ƒ/ƒ/g;

    $string =~ s/\x84|„|„/„/g;

    $string =~ s/\x85|…|…/…/g;

    $string =~ s/\x86|†|†/†/g;

    $string =~ s/\x87|‡|‡/‡/g;

    $string =~ s/\x88|ˆ|ˆ/ˆ/g;

    $string =~ s/\x89|‰|‰/‰/g;

    $string =~ s/\x8A|Š|Š/Š/g;

    $string =~ s/\x8B|‹|‹/‹/g;

    $string =~ s/\x8C|Œ|Œ/Œ/g;

    $string =~ s/\x8E|Ž/Ž/g;

    $string =~ s/\x91|‘|‘/‘/g;

    $string =~ s/\x92|’|’/’/g;

    $string =~ s/\x93|“|“/“/g;

    $string =~ s/\x94|”|”/”/g;

    $string =~ s/\x95|•|•/•/g;

    $string =~ s/\x96|–|–/–/g;

    $string =~ s/\x97|—|—/—/g;

    $string =~ s/\x98|˜|˜/˜/g;

    $string =~ s/\x99|™|™/™/g;

    $string =~ s/\x9A|š|š/š/g;

    $string =~ s/\x9B|›|›/›/g;

    $string =~ s/\x9C|œ|œ/œ/g;

    $string =~ s/\x9E|ž/ž/g;

    $string =~ s/\x9F|Ÿ|Ÿ/Ÿ/g;

    $string =~ tr/\x80-\x9F//d;

    return($string);

    }

Tested again with my configuration (Win7, Finnish kb).
MStudio Platinum 13, fonts Arial, MS sans serif, Courier, Verdana.
Em dash (the longer) Alt+0151 and an En dash Alt+0150 show in the Media Gen. window with Titles&Text, (Legacy) Text, Credit Roll, and NBTitlerPro1. In the Video Preview window they show only in Credit Roll and NBTPro1.

and Vkmast, what you experience here is absolutely the way things happen with character mapping and as I suggested not only the app hooks, but the Operating system hooks will have a bearing on what you get out.

Did anybody try the Unicode equivalents I listed above?
–
—

Just curious . . .

"Did anybody try the Unicode equivalents I listed above?"

I'm lost here. Could you say something about how to try the Unicode equivalents.

/Thanks

Ok maybe they don't parse.
nvm