Placing Chinese text into Indesign

[Chria Wynia]

Can anyone help me sove this problem? I'm trying to place Chinese text into Indesign. I tried pasting the text from "Word" "Illustrator" and a "pdf" document. The keyboard is set for Chinese and the fonts are there, can't seem to work around this one. Please help?

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Chria, could you more especific? I have been able to placed Chinese text into InDesign 2.0, the only catch right now is that ID 2.0 is not recognizing too many third party fonts. Are you under OS 10.x or OS 9.x?

Under OS 9.2.2, save your doucment in Microsoft Word document, then close the file and place it into ID. You might see weird characters, but do not worry. Select all the text and change the font to one of the fonts that came wih the OS; for Trditional Biaukai, Apple LiGothic, or Apple LiSung; under Simplify Chinese: Kai, Hei, or Song.

Text should change to the right characters. Let me know how this works. I have been able to find other ways to bring the text into ID but this one right now would be the simplest.

P.S. Saving the doucment as RTF works too.

[Chris M W]

Marco, Thanks a lot, it worked great! The problem was that I was trying to copy and paste into ID, and that just didn't want to do it. Pasting the whole Document in worked fine.

Thanks again, Chris

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

You should be able to select just a section of your document and be able to paste it into ID too.

But I am glad it works! :-))

[antonina colbert]

Hi - I'm researching applications to use with Asian and Cyrillic character sets. Adobe told me this morning that InDesign 2 does not support Chinese characters - but from your exchange above, it seems like it does.

Can you let me know how well it works with Chinese - and can / could I use thirdparty fonts (ie Big 5 Arphic fonts) with Adobe ID 2?

And do you have any information on Cyrillic font faces in ID?

I was going to go with Pagemaker, but if Adobe ID works, that would be better....

Thanks.

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Adobe still working with some issues supporting Chinese/Korean Characters when imputing text into InDesign. If I use the Chinese and Korean fonts that were installed with the Apple Langugage Kits , I can typeset the text, but not imput. All the editing hs to be done either in Microsoft Word or Simple Text (EditText in OS 10.x). Ihave not done any Cyrillic projects, but I can check if that will work, just let me know where I can find some smaples of their characters.

I have done several projects in Chinese, Korean and Japanese and beside the work around I am veery happy on the results.
If you want I can try your fonts, just send one set of the family you have: msan...@nuskin.com

or

if you have the demo version, install the fonts inside the fonts folder in the InDesign Folder, next time you start InDesign you should be able to see the font in the menu. Import some text and change the font to the one you are testing. If you see weird or pink squares the majority of the characters and not supported, you could try schanging it to the font installed by the ALK and see if the text looks different.

Any how let me know if I can be of any assistance.

[Vincent Vouwzee]

Antonina,

Yes you can work with Any PC font in ID2 but you have to put them either in a font folder named "Fonts" in the InDesign folder or in the Fonts folder of the Adobe folder found inside the Application support folder of the System folder. It works but you have no automatic control over punctuation and the like, i.e. a line can begin with a period or a comma or whatever.

This works too for any language actually; Cyrrilic, Hungarian and the like. No justification though. For that you need the special edition ID 1.5.2 ME or CE from Winsoft France. With these editions you can import any kind of text from Word and a few other word processors. Vanilla InDesign imports text as Unicode only.

Antonina, don't go with Pagemaker. I myself have licenses of Pagemaker Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Although it is made especially for these languages it was a nightmare to work with it. It inconsistently dropped characters from pages without any warning. That is, a page printed twice could have holes in it one time and print fine the next time. Imagine sending such files to a service bureau. I had to check every line carefully every time I printed. I never earned my money back from this expensive debacle. I chose Pagemaker over Quark because Pagemaker is cheaper. Well I had to buy Quark Asian versions after all.

I now have all Asian versions of Pagemaker and of Quark but work in InDesign vanilla 2.0.1 and ME. And to remedy the lack of Asian support I wrote some scripts. Go for ID2.

Warm regards, Samir

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Vincent, that was big bucks you psend for the QXP localized versions, ouchÑthat hurts!

[Vincent Vouwzee]

Yes it still hurts, but well you can't earn money without spending some. I earned money with Quark. The bummer was Pagemaker.

Warm regards, Samir

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Great news and bad news!

InDesign 2.0.1 fixes the imput problem. NOW we can actually type the chracters if necessary whitin InDesign 2.0.1. The bad news is that my 3rd party fonts do not work in ID. They are from DynaFonts Lab. I might need to give them a call to find out if they have an update or something. Otherwise, does any one know of good Asian typefaces that will work great with ID. I will give a call to Adobe too, to find out if they have Chinese and Korean Pro versions.

[Martin Wozny]

Marco,

How do you proceed when editing chinese characters in ID 2.0? In what ID2.0.1 is different from the 2.0 release regarding thge double-byte character problem?

I use a German release of ID2.0 and "AsianSuite2000" from UnionWay International Corp. for the chinese chararcters and I can only import and format - but not edit - chinese characters.

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

martin,

It seemed that InDesign 2.0 could not access the imput method of the Operating system. Exactly what was the problem, I do not know, I just know that whenever you selected the Chinese Keyboard and type the character, you could select them character youi needed, but as soon as you clicked return to paste it in your text frame in just added weird characters.

In InDesign 2.0.1ÑI hope you have that versionÑfixed the problem. According to Adobe if your fonts are up today with the unicode regulations, you might not have any problem typeing in Chinese.

The first thing that you need to do is make sure that you have the Apple Language Kits instlled for the Langauges you are trying to typeset. Then select the Langauge from the pull down menuÑyou should be able to see a flag of the localize version of the system you are running in you mnenu bar. Select the Chinese version you are going to typeset: either Traditional or Simplified. Another menu item appear in your menu bar a Òpensil iconÓ from it select show menu in Enlgish or your main language. Choose PinYin for Traditinal typeing; ABC for Simplified. If the software you are using support the ALK you can start typing. When you type a character, letÕs say ÒxianÓ a pop-up pallete appear showing you the different choices you have, hopefully you know the character you are looking for, once you find it select it and press return. The character should be placed where you have your cursor in the text.

P.S. make sure that you also have selected a chinese font bofore you start typing.

I hope this helps, if not let me know.

[gastroboy]

I Think ID2 will be a Godsend for this type of work.

Just wish they didn't issue a separate version for ME type. I hate these solutions (particularly if they come from WinSOFT who were responsible for the awful ME PM). The QXP Asian editions were not a great idea either, particularly the Korean version. I grew ulcers trying to make layouts print.

I need often to include ALL languages in the one document which I can do in standard Quark XPress with certain XTensions.

I am sure with only a little thought and effort ID2 will eventually be able to do right to left layouts as well then it will truely be THE solution for multilingual work.

Meanwhile I am still on Quark for its inate reliablity.

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

If you are not dealing with right to left imput for a language, InDesign is the program. you do not have to spend extra "MASA" (money) for the Asian languages.

[Vincent Vouwzee]

Marco,

Forgot to tell you. I can use Dynalab fonts. You have to upgrade them. Here is how:

Use OS 9.x.x , put "Font Updater Extension" from Apple into the Extension Folder of the System Folder and put all the Dynalab fonts including the fbits you want to upgrade (Chinese or whatever) into the font folder of the system folder. Restart.

During the startup you will see your fonts being updated.

BTW did you succeed in justifying 2-byte fonts using my method?

Kind regards

Samir

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Vincent, Thanks for the tip.

I will go back your previous comment, I think I did try, but I am so bussy that I can not recall.

I will let ou know.

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

VIncent, it might have been in another discussion about justifying the text, could you remind me where? Thanks

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Vincent, I did as suggested, but I did not see any message window telling me the font were being updated. I am able to type some characters, but if I try to change the font of text I received to a DynaLab Font and some of the text did not look correctly. How long ago you bought your fonts?

[Martin Wozny]

Marco,

indeed, I've started a new discussion regarding the use of db-characters in ID2.0 under the new topic "Editing chinese characters with InDesign 2.0" in this forum; this discussion will be interesting for people working under Windows. I hope that I may be able to give good news about progress in this case next week...

Martin

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Vincent, Update

It seems that placing the fonts in the System folder and restarting the computer did fixe the characters.

The problem I am finding out is that the Apple Chinese fonts and the DynaLab fonts have different unicode numbers assign to the characters. Let's say that I select Apple LiSung Unicode 8ABF; Big5: BDD5 which referece to 'Tiao' phonetically, if I then change the font to DF HeiLight the character change to a different character with the same font info. If I type the phonetics 'tiao' I can find the character in the DFHeiLight font and imput it in my text but the information I get is: Unicode 79F8; Big5: D6C5.

No wonder why the whole text change when I change the font. Any solutions to this problem?

[Vincent Vouwzee]

Marco,

I was wondering what you were doing wrong. But alright solved.

Dynalab fonts don't have any mapping tables according to the AAT font tool of Apple. And I didn't find a way to add them to it yet. That's the biggest problem. I tried adding the tables with Truekeys of UniDoc Systems but alas it chokes on them.

So to solve this problem we have to add Cmaps to the fonts. All Apple fonts tools can't open these fonts. Any other ideas?

Warm regards,

Samir

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Forgive my ignorance, how do you add CMaps information to the font? Could FontLab or Fontographer can help on this task?

[Vincent Vouwzee]

Fontlab won't do, you need AsiaFont Studio from FontLab a very expensive program. It is cheaper to buy a new CD with Chinese fonts than to buy ASF. Fontographer can't handle 2-byte fonts and AAT from Apple refuses to open the fonts for lack of even 1 table.

You add tables with AAT.

Warm regards,

Samir

[Marco Antonio SantaMaria]

Thanks Vincent