Hi Mark,

XMP supports special characters beyond the standard ASCII using UTF-8 encoding. The problem is on the IPTC side: IPTC character encoding is fantastically obscure, and not well implemented by other software. Even Photoshop does not adhere to the IPTC specification, and will write Latin1 characters ad-hoc in IPTC without properly setting the CodedChararacterSet tag.

For this reason it is very difficult to properly handle special characters in IPTC.

Also, I don't have a very good test set of IPTC containing special characters from other applications, so it is difficult for me to know what the best way to handle this is. Can you tell me what encoding is used in your IPTC samples that contain special characters, and what the CodedCharacterSet tag is set to?

According to this source, it may be sufficient in most cases to just assume Latin-1 encoding if not specified. If this is true, I could add an option which would force ExifTool to assume Latin1 encoding and convert appropriately.

If anyone has any ideas on this matter, I'd love to hear them.

- Phil