Subtitles in DVD Studio Pro

Hi,

Is it really this complicated to get correct subtitles into DVD Studio Pro or am I missing something?
I have a documentary film and subtitles in .txt for swedish, english, kurdish, turkish AND arabic!

My issuese are:
1. I have .txt files with timecode staring with 10 and DVDSP wants them to start with 00. How can I change this in DVD Studio Pro? I don't have the time to change it in all the .txt documents.
2. I have got turkish and kurdish translations as word documents written on a pc. I have then tried to convert these to .txt using Western Mac OS Roman as the text encoding (that is the encoding that DVDSP wants). But then it seems that some letters are not found. When I chose Unicorn as encoding then all letters are found (but DVDSP does not accept that encoding). So it seems that some turkish and kurdish letters are not supported in the text encoding. I have worked with russian subs earlier and there was no problems.
3. I don't even get close when it comes to arabic. I have read at some forums that you have to use a graphic file to get arabic to show correctly. How do I go about this?

Thankful for all tips!
Maria Rinaldo

Subs are not that hard in DVDSP, if you follow some basic rules of thumb...

Firstly, and most importantly, you have already got your subs ina text file - this is crucial, and will save you hours of time if you need to make slight changes.

Changing the time for the start point will need to be done externally - if in doubt, do it outside of DVDSP at all times. There are several really good subtitling tools available but very few good ones are free. You could also use Excel or any other decent spreadsheet program - making timecode changes in these are pretty easy.

Character encoding is tricky... Unicode should be OK for most western languages, but make sure it is RTF. Using images for subtitles is a very good idea - have a look at tools like 'Belle Nuit' to help you here.