I think by typographer's quotes he meant a left and right quote mark or a open quote and a closing quote. Something other than the basic one size fits both that you get on the keyboard.

“ Like this ”

JBJones

Alan,
does this happen in other apps as well? Do you have a non-English Windows version? Is your Arial font very old?
As you can see from my questioning I find it hard to believe that Vegas is doing this. I've been playing with a lot of various fonts in Vegas (dingbats and stuff) creating little 2D animations and having a great time until Satish came along and made it too easy :-). And I've never seen Vegas show me anything other than the font/symbol I wanted it to.
I think you should look outside Vegas for the reason behind this problem.
Anyway, typographers' quotes are «these», are they not?
Tor

I'm able to reproduce the problem too.

It happened with all the tt and ot fonts I tried. I tested other programs as well. Photoshop 5.5, Xara3D and Paintshop pro 7 and 8 have text-edit boxes similar to vegas but they work fine.

As a workaround you can create whatever title in PSP, Photoshop or other graphics program and save it as a PNG with transparency. You can do pretty much anything with your imported graphic/text that you can do with a text event except edit the words.

In case it might help here are the stats for my computer: Vegas 3 & 4 on a PIII 600MHZ with W2Kpro, IE6, SP2, DX 8.1, WMP 6.4, a main concept dv codec, a cheap Hercules Kyro 4000xt video card, a pinnacle dv500plus with v4.5 drivers and a partridge in a pear tree.

Good luck!

I too could reproduce it. Maybe it's Vegas after all.
If you must have them (and cannot use the ones I mentioned in my previous post - they work in Vegas) you can put the left qoute in a track above, rotate it 180 degrees in Track Motion and position it where you want it (use Placement in the Text generator). That ought to solve it. The next event on the same track will be rotated already, so you just have to place it.
And you can quote me on that.
Tor

> Anyway, typographers' quotes are «these», are they not?

They are not. Those are guillemets; also known as angled quotes or chevrons.

I had a similar problem a few days ago. I had a powerpoint presentation that I was copying my bulletted lists over to the Vegas Text box. In the text window, the bulletted list looked fine. In the video preview window it was really wacked out. Ended up getting a bunch of Greek looking letters. I tried changing to multiple different fonts with the same result -- text editor looked fine, video preview had strange characters.

I would be happy to post the .veg file if interested, or if Sonic Foundry would like to take a look. I ended up saving each powerpoint slide as an image and importing into Vegas. Which was a pain every time I needed to make a change to the text.

Alan,

I think the “problem” may be with the Arial font itself. At least, in my Character Map, Arial seems to have identical glyphs for both the left and right doublequote and for the left and right singlequote. Try using a different font. I notice I am typing this response in a window that seems to be using Courier, but it gets changed to something like Arial, if not Arial itself, when the message is posted.

-- Seeker --

P.S. I just edited this message to put Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 around the word "problem" in the first sentence of my message. They now lean properly for opening and closing here in this window, but I bet after this message gets posted they won't. I also notice that the standard keyboard entry for a double quote around the word "problem" here in this Post Script is using a different glyph yet for the double quote in whatever font I am currently typing in. Apparently this Courier or whatever it is has three different representations for a double quote: left leaning, right leaning, and more or less upright.

Reproducable under Windows XP Professional too. ANSI 145 to 151 seem to be affected with all fonts (TrueType, Type 1, and both flavours of OpenType). Language is English (United Kingdom).

The bullet character (ASCII 149) is one of those affected.

Looks like Powerpoint and other text-apps support extended character sets, which some apps - like Notepad - don't. But the quotes Alan is having trouble with are within the regular character set, so Vegas should use it properly in any case.
I stand corrected on the chevrons - they are the posh quotes in Norwegian writing - different tradition, I guess.
Tor

Try this, just to see what you get: Create something in another application with a bulletted list, such as powerpoint which is what I used.

Then copy and paste the text into Vegas text editor. It should like fine, but in the video preview several of the characters that are not the actual bullets are goofed up. I had entire lines get messed up to a different font. I am also in Windows XP Professional.

> Create something in another application with a bulletted list, such as powerpoint which is what I used.

I can confirm that there's a problem. Bulleted lists prepared in WordPad and PowerPoint can definitely be corrupted (greek characters in the wrong font) though it sometimes took a change of font size to do it. Lists pasted from Word seem to be OK in my briefest of experiments.

Seeker, your horse came in last. How much did you bet?
And it's not just Arial. AND it's not just Microsoft's fonts.
Tor

> Apparently this Courier or whatever it is has

That's as it should be. Almost every font will have these three characters.

Vegas is using double primes (your upright quotes) instead of proper quotation marks, whatever the font. It isn't reproducing single quotes at all and there are also problems with bullets and em and en dashes.

> I am typing this response in a window that seems to be using Courier, but it gets changed to something like Arial, if not Arial itself, when the message is posted.

Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, MS Sans Serif are specified in the Style Sheet.

Well, in a way I am glad it is not just my system because then I don't have to try and figure out how to fix it. Yes, I also found it didn't matter if I changed the fonts.

This was in VV3 for me, are you using 4?

I reproduced it in V4.
Tor

I was testing with Vegas 4.0 but the Text generator seems to be entirely unchanged and I'm not surprised to find we're getting similar results.

More then you probably want to know...

The so-called typographer's quotes have a little curl to them. if I remember right They are NOT typically part of most character sets. See link below, near bottom of page.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Since you're all using Windows, I'll bet most of you have Word. If so the curly quote should be the default in the later versions. If not it should be in one of the drop down menu choices. Don't have Word on this box can't check now.

Sadly doing a cut and paste directly from Word to Vegas don't work. A crude work around is to write your text in Word, paste it in Photoshop then drag the photoshop file into Vegas and it will work. The problem aside from the nusiance of three steps is you're going to be limited in width. But at least it works. At least in version four. <wink>

Anyone know how or if you can embed U+201C and U-201D Unicode into Windows? That would give you the quotes. If not it works directly with Vegas, I don't know.

Barleycorn,

Thanks for the clarification. Apparently SoFo has a bug or two to fix.

-- Seeker --

> typographer's quotes...They are NOT typically part of most character sets.

They are. If you check I think you'll find that, as ANSI/Windows-1252 147 and 148, they're likely to be included in every text font on your system.

> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

The subject of this article is actually the problems caused by the pairing of apostrophes and grave accents by Unix users (something that can be seen in one's browser practically every day unfortunately). This is not an issue for Windows users.

> I'll bet most of you have Word. If so the curly quote should be the default in the later versions.

It's not that the 'curly quote' is the default; rather, replacing '"Straight quotes" with “smart quotes”' is a default setting for AutoFormat As You Type. The difference is that smart quotes will use the appropriate characters for the language so that in French for example, guillemets will be used.

> Anyone know how or if you can embed U+201C and U-201D Unicode into Windows? That would give you the quotes.

If the operating system is Unicode-aware (like Windows 2000 and XP) you can simply use Character Map; otherwise copy and paste from any application that can place Unicode Text on the clipboard. You may as well just use Alt+147 and Alt+148 though. Whatever, it makes no difference in Vegas 3 and 4: the characters corresponding to ANSI 145 to 151 aren't handled correctly.

> Looks like Powerpoint and other text-apps support extended character sets, which some apps - like Notepad - don't.

Both Notepad and WordPad can handle Unicode text in Windows XP (and I presume Windows 2000).

> Apparently SoFo has a bug or two to fix.

Definitely. I hope they'll give these things a thorough review. There were some surprising problems with the text handling in DVD Architect too.