How Aperture encodes non-ascii chars

Question

It looks like Aperture uses a way of encode chars as UTF that seem to be bit unusual, many application (especially web apps) expects another way of encoding Unicode chars. The end result is that non-ascii chars comes out really strange.
When I use applescript to read the IPTC info I need to do something like this before using the data:
set c_title to normalize unicode p_title without decomposition
Is there some way of telling Aperture to do this automatically when exporting photos?
(sorry about the bad use of Unicode terminology but I don't know the area very well)

Answer 1

I've spent quite a bit of time on this topic - I'm the author of Phoshare http://code.google.com/p/phoshare/, an open-source tool to export images and metadata from iPhoto and Aperture. Storing non-ASCII characters in image metadata is a messy business. If you want to get a taste of it, have a look at the Exiftool FAQ at http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/faq.html#Q10 . A quote: "Most textual information in EXIF is stored in ASCII format, ... However *it is not uncommon for applications to write UTF‑8 or other encodings where ASCII is expected*". This leads to all sorts of problems, because the reader will have to make assumptions about the encoding used by the writer.
In the case of Aperture, I have found that it writes metadata encoded in a way consistent with what most other applications and on-line services expect. Most of the encoding problems I've debugged where caused by bad input data. E.g. the characters were encoded improperly to begin with, but in a way that they still display as expected in some places (like Aperture). Can you try erasing some of the meta data in Aperture, and retype them from scratch (e.g. not copy-paste, which would paste the same stuff right back). Also make sure that you force-updated the preview images, so that the new meta data get written into the files.