We’ve been seeing an increasing number of images uploaded to Fotobroker with IPTC data coming in with curved quotes – or as some software refers to them – “smart quotes”.

These ‘special characters’ have always been a problem with files destined for the Web because there isn’t a completely standard way for encoding these characters for display on a screen. Windows uses one way, Macintosh uses another, and Unix yet another.

To solve this issue Fotobroker will automatically convert curved quotes (single, double and apostrophes) to straight quotes, which do have a standard way of being encoded and hence are easily displayed in a web browser. This conversion will be applied to all captions and headlines.

You may still see an odd character or two in your nightly Fotobroker image upload reports, as the reports will always contain the actual text extracted from the images – and depending on your mail client and operating system they may or may not display correctly. On the web site, though, you should no longer see any funny looking characters where quotes or apostrophes should obviously be.

Over the course of the next week or so we will be updating all the caption and headline text in the Fotobroker database to replace the existing curved quotes and apostrophes from previously imported images.