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help khmer unicode subtitle

Posted: 17 Jan 2011 09:59
by andylau
help khmer unicode subtitle , khmer subtitle won't render properly
check the picture below and help thanks
Image

Re: help khmer unicode subtitle

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 10:41
by andylau
can any body give me a clue how the unicode work for VLC ?

Re: help khmer unicode subtitle

Posted: 27 Jan 2011 14:28
by VLC_help
Unicode itself should work out of box. It would help us if you told how those subtitles are wrong, since I for example don't understand khmer.

Re: help khmer unicode subtitle

Posted: 21 Mar 2011 07:06
by mushrooms
Andy, are you using Windows XP?

I think it is a problem with VLC not being able to utilize Uniscribe for the subtitles in XP. In the menu bar, the character rendering for Khmer shows up perfectly fine, so the possibility of correct rendering is there. But the subtitles are not being rendered correctly. And that can be noted with the subscript cross (+) and the dotted ovals which are placeholders for character subscript/superscript combinations. One would only be able to see such features when characters are written independently/out of order/randomly, if there are invisible spacing (the Invisible Separator) preventing them from combining, or when the application they are being displayed in does not utilize proper Uniscribe support.

The problem for total Unicode in support in XP was that you had to update the Uniscribe rendering file to a version that supported the Khmer character set (this is due to Khmer Unicode support being introduced after XP was made). Yet somehow, most programs did not take into account Uniscribe support under the XP environment. I'm not sure how to explain it as I'm not very tech-savvy...it's one thing to be able to display Unicode characters and another to support the rendering through Uniscribe. So when you see characters with a subscript cross or dotted oval, that is a sign that the program is not utilizing the Uniscribe file due to whatever reason.

This was also a problem in other programs too, such as Adobe Photoshop (but that ended with CS2 and later versions IIRC).

I recall making a Khmer subtitle for some video several years ago and ended up coming across the same problem in VLC. My best solution was to use a program that converted the Khmer subtitle text from Unicode characters into Latin (so that I can set the display font to the Limon fonts which is using regular encoding of Latin characters with Khmer typefaces). There is such a converter available at KhmerOS' website under their downloads section.

As of now, I'm on Windows 7. I believe VLC would be able to render Khmer Unicode subtitles correctly, but I will have to make or find a Khmer .SRT file first...