How to get the accents and apostrophes right in your on-screen text
Tell Vizard Agent the language and ask it to fix the accents and the apostrophes together. It corrects the typography across every card and caption, re-renders only the shots that contain them, then inspects the accented characters on a rendered frame — because text that is correct in the file can still lose its accents at the point it is drawn.
What is the short version?
Generated title cards drop diacritics. Uppercase makes it worse, because a lot of styling pipelines uppercase text and lose the accent on the way. To a native speaker the result reads as sloppy in a way that is instantly obvious and hard to unsee.
- Go to Vizard Agent with the cut.
- Say the language and ask for the typography to be fixed.
- Ask it to verify on a rendered frame.
What do you need before you start?
The video and the language. That second part is not obvious housekeeping — Vizard Agent needs to know whether a missing mark is a mistake or a legitimate spelling, because the same string can be correct in one language and wrong in the next.
- The language. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese.
- The cut, or the text sources. Cards and captions both.
- Whether text is uppercased. That is where accents die.
- Any proper nouns. They have their own rules.
- The typeface. Some are missing the glyphs entirely.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the language and ask for both problems in one instruction. Accents and apostrophes fail for the same reasons and in the same places, so fixing one and not the other means going round again a day later.
Prompt
Variants worth knowing:
- "Accents and apostrophes." They travel together.
- "Only the shots that change." Keeps it cheap.
- "On a real frame." The file is not proof.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Here is the shape of it on a real French edit with animated typography throughout. The order is worth noting: the correction is applied across the whole set of text, and the verification happens on pixels rather than on the text file.
- Reads every piece of on-screen text in the edit.
- Applies the correct accents across all the typography.
- Finds the apostrophe typos separately.
- Replaces them with the correct character.
- Checks the typeface has the glyphs it now needs.
- Re-renders the affected shots only.
- Pulls frames from those shots.
- Inspects the accented characters up close.
- Confirms nothing else in the frame changed.
- Rebuilds the master with the corrected shots.
Step five is the failure that looks like a different problem. If the typeface has no glyph for an accented character, the correct text renders as a blank box or silently drops the mark, and it looks exactly like the bug you just fixed — so Vizard Agent checks the font before blaming the text.
Step eight is why this needs a frame. Text is correct in the file and wrong on screen more often than anyone expects, usually because something uppercased it downstream, and reading the source file tells you nothing about that.
Step three is separated out for a reason. An apostrophe typo is not a spelling mistake and will not be caught by anything looking for missing diacritics, so Vizard Agent hunts for the wrong character as its own pass rather than hoping it falls out of the accent fix.
Step six keeps the fix proportionate. A typography correction should not cost a full re-render of a fifteen-minute video, so Vizard Agent rebuilds only the shots whose text actually changed.
What does the result look like?
Text that a native speaker reads straight through without flinching at it. The accents are all present, including on the capitals, and the apostrophes are the proper typographic character rather than the straight quote a keyboard produces by default.
Vizard Agent also lists which shots it re-rendered, so you can confirm at a glance that nothing else in the edit moved while the text was being corrected.
When does this not work well?
Some of this is not a text problem at all. A typeface with no accented glyphs, a caption engine that uppercases after styling, or burnt-in text in the source footage all need a different fix from correcting the spelling.
- Fonts without the glyphs. Change the typeface.
- Uppercasing after styling. A pipeline problem.
- Burnt-in source text. Correcting means painting it out.
- Right-to-left scripts. A larger question than accents.
- Auto-generated captions. They may need re-transcribing.
How do you fix a result that came back wrong?
Quote the string itself, wrong version and right version. Because Vizard Agent is working from the actual text of the edit, a correction written out that way is completely unambiguous in a way that "the accent on the second card" never is.
- "It should be é, not e." Corrected everywhere it appears.
- "There is a box instead of a letter." A font problem.
- "The capitals lost them again." Uppercasing downstream.
- "That word is a name." Vizard Agent leaves it alone.
How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?
By hand this gets caught late, usually by somebody who actually speaks the language watching the finished cut, and then fixed one card at a time. The apostrophes are almost always missed in that pass, because a straight quote looks very nearly right.
| By hand | Vizard Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| When it is found | On the final review | As a pass over all text |
| Scope | Card by card | Every piece of text at once |
| Apostrophes | Usually missed | Fixed with the accents |
| Verifying | Reading the file | Inspecting a rendered frame |
| Re-render cost | The whole video | Only the changed shots |
Common questions
Why do accents disappear? Often because text was uppercased downstream. Vizard Agent checks for that.
Does it handle capitals? Yes. Accented capitals are correct in French, and Vizard Agent keeps them.
What about apostrophes? Vizard Agent replaces straight quotes with the typographic character.
Will it change my font? Only if the current one lacks the glyphs, and it will tell you first.
Does it fix captions too? Yes. Vizard Agent handles cards and captions in the same pass.
Can it check the spoken narration? That is a separate question. Ask Vizard Agent about pronunciation.
Will it re-render everything? No, only the shots whose text changed.
How do I know it worked? Vizard Agent shows you the accented characters on a real frame.
What about proper nouns? Tell Vizard Agent which words are names and it leaves them.
Does it work for Spanish and Portuguese? Yes, and for Vietnamese, which is the hardest case.
Can it check the whole video at once? Yes. That is cheaper than finding them one at a time.
What if a box appears instead? That is a missing glyph. Vizard Agent will suggest a typeface.
Will subtitles in a file be fixed too? Yes, if you hand Vizard Agent the subtitle file along with the video.
Why did I not notice? Because missing accents look like ordinary text until you read the language.