[ INFO ] Maestro SBT 2.6.0.0 *does* support Unicode

[Midzuki]

@ https://forum.videohelp.com/topic340389.html#1774990,
jman98 wrote:

but I have yet to see ANY subtitle program that support Unicode.
If there are any that correctly support it, I'd love to know what they are
as it must be something I've never tried.

, which made me take the time to find out that yes, Maestro SBT 2.6.0.0
does appear to support Unicode-text correctly (thanks a lot jman).
The only problem is, "nobody"(read: 'you know who') cares about teaching
the poor end-users how to make the damn feature work appropriately
(that is to say, load binary-text subtitle files, uncheck "balanced word wrap",
set "script font code page" to "use style's", set "multibyte code page" to "65001/UTF-8")


+++++++++++

[xbt2000]

I'm just posting to share my experience with Maestro SBT and unicode subtitles from Aegisub, in the hope that it might be useful for someone else.

I've been trying to render some thai subs created with Aegisub 2.1.8 using MaestroSBT-unicode-2.6.0.0. Exporting the subs from Aegisub as .ssa, with UTF-8 encoding, and then opening them in Maestro SBT as described above, did not work for me. Altough the output consisted of thai characters, it was not the same as the input. Changing the "multibyte codepage setting" did not seem to have any effect at all.

Following an advice in the thread mentioned in the above post, I changed my windows to use thai codepage. Then rendering subs exported with thai codepage CP874 worked perfectly, but only as long as the subtitles did not contain characters not present in CP874. In my case I had some names with non-standard latin based characters. The lines containing these names were skipped during export. I thought of the possibility of editing the few occurances by hand after rendering, but then I made one last try, exporting in UTF-16 this time.

Guess what, perfect result. No need to change any codepage settings at all.

Lesson: If UTF-8 fails, don't be afraid to try UTF-16.

[El Heggunte]

I'm just posting to share my experience with Maestro SBT and unicode subtitles from Aegisub, in the hope that it might be useful for someone else.

Many thanks for sharing your experience.

Exporting the subs from Aegisub as .ssa, with UTF-8 encoding, and then opening them in Maestro SBT as described above,

but then I made one last try, exporting in UTF-16 this time.

Guess what, perfect result. No need to change any codepage settings at all.

Lesson: If UTF-8 fails, don't be afraid to try UTF-16.

Unless my English is very bad, what Midzuki meant in his post is:

use "UTF-16" (also known as "binary-text", in his own wording;

remember, UTF-8 doesn't contain "non-printable" characters, and
MaestroSBT doesn't let you choose UCS-2 or UTF-16 explicitly,
therefore, ...).

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ADDENDUM

After some additional reading, now I think MaestroSBT has a bug which
doesn't let it always "translate" UTF-8 into the correct Unicode codepoints;
by using UCS-2 or UTF-16, no "translation" is required.