Re: Chinese, Japanese, Korean-MUST READ!

[reneechiang]

Thanks for the explanation.

BTW, I am working on a Windows system; I am only in this MAC area of the forum because this is where Diane originally brought up this issue of the template.

I did get some more details from the originator of the text that had wrong characters. It turns out the problem arose in the Word document itself. At some point, Word automatically changed the font of the entire text from Simsun to PMingliu (which I think was caused by Automatic Language Detection being turned on, which is the Word default). The editor could show me both versions (before and after) but I could not replicate the problem on my own machine to see exactly how this happened. Two of the characters which were repeatedly changed to "wrong" characters were:

余 became 餘
誌 became 志 (as in雜志)

I repeat: BOTH versions were in traditional Chinese characters, just with different fonts.

Since both font sets contain all simplified and traditional characters, why would this happen? As you said, theoretically, it shouldn’t. Perhaps this is some kind of Word problem, rather than an actual problem with the fonts. [Perhaps this is the wrong forum for this issue. I did try searching the Microsoft site, but did not find anything on this issue, and there just seems to be less hope of an intelligent and useful response there, than here…]

[reneechiang]

As for the layout issue, I found that I no longer have a problem, so that's great! I almost would have thought I'd imagined things, but since I did create a pdf of some sample problem pages for Diane Burns more than a year ago, I could see that the squashing together did in fact exist back then, but is gone now, on the same file. The difference? I am still using InDesign CS2, but have since switched to a different computer with a different operating system, and therefore the fonts are probably different.

Conclusion: I’m happy to say that it looks like I’ll be able to use Diane’s fantastic template on future book projects.

The Adobe Ming font appears to be quite limited in its character range, leaving holes in the text (for example, the character
爲
is missing), making it altogether unusable, at least on my system.

Problem: I’m still lacking an understanding of Chinese font sets, for example why so many of them, like Adobe Ming, have an incomplete set of characters, or how characters input using GB are ultimately changed into Unicode, or how InDesign handles encoding.

[David_W....@adobeforums.com]

There is no such thing as a "complete" Chinese font as the number of characters is too vast. This makes gaining an understanding of the various character sets is worthwhile. For example, it is worth remembering that some of the characters not included in Adobe Ming, say, are simply variants of more standard forms. I once corrected hundreds of "shuo" characters in a work on the Chinese novel (xiaoshuo) where the typist had used the Japanese form: this is available in MingLiU, so it looked as though the typist was typing phonetically, missed the more traditional version in the list of homophones, instead found the variant farther down, and then let the input system "help" by moving the variant to the top of the list thereafter. One of the joys of InDesign is that its glyph palette can show you alternate forms allowed in OT fonts -- if the font happens to use the feature (check out Adobe Fangsong Std or Kozuka Mincho Pro).

Good luck!
David

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

... Perhaps this is some kind of Word problem, rather than an actual problem
with the fonts. ...

Yes, definitely, this is a case of Word being overly helpful. In your first example, Word is replacing what it thinks is a simplified character with its traditional form, ignoring the fact that 余 is a character in its own right, and not just the simplified form of 餘. In your second example, Word seems to be using the context of the character to make a "correction" to the text -- I believe zazhi is usually written 雜志 these days, so Word is replacing 誌 with 志 to conform with what it thinks is the correct way of writing it. But of course 雜誌 is a perfectly legitimate way of writing it.

So the solution is to have the editor turn off the "feature" in Word that is making the changes, if that's still possible at this point. I don't know for sure what the feature in question would be called. Maybe "auto-correct" or something like that.

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

Problem: I’m still lacking an understanding of Chinese font sets, for
example why so many of them, like Adobe Ming, have an incomplete set of
characters, or how characters input using GB are ultimately changed into
Unicode, or how InDesign handles encoding.

If you are using Mac OS X or Windows 2000/XP/Vista, then the operating system handles everything in Unicode. So even if you are typing in simplified Chinese, the text is Unicode, not "GB." GB and Big-5 are legacy encodings that still play a vital role on the web and in e-mail, but when you are dealing with text on your computer, these days it's all Unicode. Certainly that's the case within InDesign.

When faced with a Chinese font, you need to figure out what character set(s) it contains. It's a complicated topic, but if you read here <http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/character_sets.html>, you'll get a general idea of what's what. Big-5, Big-5E, Hong Kong SCS, GB 2312, GBK, and GB 18030 are the most common Chinese repertoires you'll find.

The character variant you mentioned [&#29234;] is not in Big-5 (and thus Adobe Ming Standard), though it is in Big-5E. It's not in GB 2312, of course, but it is in GBK and GB 18030, because it is in Unicode's original "CJK Unified Ideographs" block. It's also in all Japanese and Korean fonts.

[reneechiang]

Unfortunately, upon studying the template issue further, I discovered that I made a mistake yesterday. In fact, I am STILL having trouble with Diane Burn's template for traditional Chinese.

Commas run into the next character and wide spaces sometimes appear between punctuations.

I've tried using different fonts: PMingliu, Mingliu, and Adobe Ming, but though the problem appears in different places, the problem still exists.

I've tried leaving the kerning alone, setting it to optical, setting it to metrics, but as with the fonts, the problem appears in different places, but still remains.

I'm so disappointed! All that excitement for nothing...

[reneechiang]

kerasmus,
You say that all text typed in Windows systems now are Unicode. I read somewhere that the new GB standard is required for all software being sold in China now (I think it's the GB 18030 you mentioned, kerasmus). Does that mean that despite this government requirement, even computers in the mainland with Chinese OS are using Unicode for input? When is the GB 18030 actually used then?

BTW, I do not actually input anything myself. The text is written and edited by people using Word, mostly with simplified Chinese based software and OS. I only do final layout by bringing everything into InDesign, but I do change the fonts.

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

Commas run into the next character and wide spaces sometimes appear between
punctuations.

Maybe you need to look more carefully at the Unicode characters you are using for punctuation? I could be wrong, but I doubt this is an issue with the templates or InDesign. It sounds like maybe you are trying to work with a mix of proportional punctuation and monospaced "fullwidth" or "ideographic" punctuation. The key blocks to review in Unicode are Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, General Punctuation, CJK Symbols and Punctuation, and Fullwidth and Halfwidth Forms.

For example, Unicode contains both a proportional comma [U+002C] and a "fullwidth" comma [U+FF0C] often used with Chinese text. The same goes for full stop, colon, and semicolon. Different Chinese fonts handle the fullwidth forms differently -- sometimes the punctuation mark is in the middle of the space, other times it is on the right edge, leaving a gap after it. The same goes for specifically CJK punctuation marks, like the so-called "ideographic comma" and the "ideographic full stop," not to mention things like quotation marks and brackets.

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

... Does that mean that despite this government requirement, even computers

in the mainland with Chinese OS are using Unicode for input? When is the
GB 18030 actually used then?

Yes. The Chinese government requires GB 18030 support in all operating systems sold in China. It doesn't require that the system use GB 18030 exclusively, or anything like that. So Windows (and Mac OS X, etc.) can use Unicode internally as long as they support GB 18030.

In addition, GB 18030 is now fully coordinated with the Unicode Standard, so although the code points are different, all GB 18030 characters map directly to Unicode.

GB 18030's utility is in the realm of backward compatibility. All characters in GB 2312 and GBK are at the same code points in GB 18030. Thus, by mandating GB 18030 support in all systems, China guarantees at least system-level support for its legacy encodings.

[Matthew...@adobeforums.com]

I don't know if this is related to your problem, but with punctuation (especially commas and full stops), I believe Chinese fonts usually have either traditional style or simplified style, but not both, and I don't think unicode differentiates between them. So even if Simsun has traditional characters, it has simplified-style punctuation, and MingLiu may have simplified characters, but has traditional-style punctuation. Also in my experience the Asian versions of Indesign don't handle the spacing of Chinese punctuation characters particularly well, especially for Traditional, I think because the bundled moji-kumi settings have not been adjusted for Chinese (ie they are the same as in the Japanese version). It's possible to improve them, but from what I can see there are still some combinations that occur in Chinese that are not possible to edit, and which you have to kern manually.

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

My apologies, I wasn't sure what you knew about CJK punctuation, so I thought I'd bring it up, in case you were trying to work with a mix of Latin and CJK punctuation.

I'm more than happy to look at a sample of what you're talking about. However, while I have a fair amount of experience in Chinese computing, I'm not an expert when it comes to InDesign -- I'd guess that you know more about it than I do. In addition, I'm running CS3 on Mac OS X 10.5.

I don't see any way to send private messages within these forums, so here is my "public" e-mail address: hello....@gmail.com

[reneechiang]

As far as I can tell, all the punctuation being used are CJK specific ideographic ones, as they would naturally be when entered using Chinese input. The commas and periods are centered in the middle of the space both horizontally and vertically in traditional Chinese fonts like PMingLiU instead of at the bottom, and semicolons, brackets, and other punctuation take up almost an entire character-width space (when viewed from Word or in InDesign when kerning is set to Metrics instead of Optical). As part of my layout work, I do a global search for English input commas and periods in any Chinese text, and replace them with ideographic ones as necessary, but they are usually very few in an entire book-length text.

Neither the author nor I am aware of what Unicode codes or blocks are being used in our workflow, and I imagine we shouldn't have to. In a paragraph where all the punctuation is of the same kind, and there is no change of font, the problem still exists.

If I could send you a sample pdf file, and the accompanying InDesign file, that would help. Describing this in words is becoming really cumbersome.

[reneechiang]

kerasmus:
No apologies needed - I'm so glad someone is responding to my questions, and in fact, I do have lots of holes in my knowledge of Chinese encoding. I'm at home now, but will send my sample pdf and InDesign file to you when I get to work tomorrow. Thanks!

Matthew:
I am using an English version of InDesign with Diane Burn's special template for traditional Chinese text, so I'm not sure I am having the same problem you are describing. My problems don't arise with any specific combinations, but seem to squash an entire line of text, or not. Do you have a work-around for your problem?

[Matthew...@adobeforums.com]

As you say it's hard describing the problems verbally but it sounds like yours could be the same as the ones I was having with traditional Chinese, ie bad justification, lines overrunning right margins, bad spacing around and between punctuation characters. Like I say I sorted most of them by creating a new moji-kumi setting (which you can't do in the English version of ID). If you like I could send you a ID template containing the setting, if you don't mind enabling the "Allow others to see my e-mail address in my profile" in your preferences (I don't think you can send private messages on this forum, as far as I can see).

[reneechiang]

Matthew:
Thanks! I would love to try your template to see if it fixes my problem. Although, I am using the English version of ID, and on a PC. Anyway, can't hurt to try.

[reneechiang]

For those of you out there with the same problem, this is a note to let you know that my problem with Diane Burn's template (of punctuation running into the next character) was because I was using PMingLiU font, which places punctuation in the middle of a space. Diane's template was apparently created for SimSun (and other mainland fonts) which places punctuation like commas and periods to the left.

Though Simsun is usually used for simplified Chinese, it does also cover traditional Chinese characters, so that's my solution for now.

Thanks to Matthew and kerasmus!

[Vickie...@adobeforums.com]

I am having troubles finding bold or italic choices for international OpenType fonts on the MAC; specifically for InDesign CS3. Amazingly, these choices are available in Word but when I import the translated copy into InDesign I no longer have these choices. And in my layouts it is so important that I at least have a bold choice.

Any suggestions? Do I have to purchase another set of fonts?

Thanks so much, Vickie

[reneechiang]

I'm not sure about Japanese and Korean, but if you are using Chinese fonts, there are no "bold" and "italic" versions of the characters, at least in any of the Chinese fonts I've used, that is, it is not designed into the font. Thus, it does not import with your Word document.

To approximate bold for such fonts in InDesign, you can just add a thin outline, say with a weight of .125 in your Character Color. For italics, you can add a bit of a Skew, maybe 12 degrees.

However, in Chinese, it is usually more appropriate to choose the correct font to give the right effect, rather than creating bold or italic versions of a font; for example, using Simsun for normal text, Simhei for titles, FangSong for italic text.

[David_...@adobeforums.com]

The best/appropriate way of using 'bold' face in Chinese is using 'weight' from the same typeface family. Bold is the Roman terms, just like San Serif is 'Gothic' in CJK languages. We have a typeface PDF example at <http://www.chinesetypesetting.com/typeface.html>
if you find it helpful.
David

[Harbs]

If there's anyone with a CJK version of InDesign, an is willing to do me a favor, I'd like to know what the numbering options are there. I'd like the CJK versions of this menu:
<http://i37.tinypic.com/1hq8hc.png>

Thanks,
Harbs

[james...@adobeforums.com]

This is the first time I've used Chinese in an InDesign document.

My client provided a word document in the Chinese characters and I copied and pasted it into my InDesign document. I choose a font from the library included in my font library (that came with the program/computer).

I created a PDF and sent it to the client for approval and it was OK'd.

When I flight checked the job, it showed there wasn't any problem with fonts. But when I looked at the collected font folder, there wasn't any Chinese fonts included.

What have I done wrong?

What do I have to do to collect the fonts I'm using?

many thanks,

James Robie

[reneechiang]

I don't think you did anything wrong.

Packages, at least those created by English language InDesign (which is also what I use), do not package CJK fonts (that's Chinese Japanese and Korean). Notice in the Package Publication dialog box, the option checkbox reads "Copy Fonts (except CJK)". Perhaps the same is true for PDFs also.

What I do is make a note of all the Chinese fonts being used through a preflight or while packaging, then copy them manually into the font folder.

If anyone knows of a better way, or can explain why InDesign does not package CJK fonts, I'd be glad to hear of it.

[james...@adobeforums.com]

reneechiang,

Where do I find the fonts to copy them into folders?

Thanks for replying.

James Robie

[reneechiang]

You can find a list of which fonts your document/book is using by doing a File - Preflight in InDesign. Click on fonts on the left column. A list will appear of all the fonts you need.

If you are using a Windows system, the font files are in the directory:
C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\

[james...@adobeforums.com]

reneechiang,

I know which fonts I need but I don't know where to find them so I can copy them into a folder. They don't seem to be in my font folder that's in my computer but when I work in InDesign they show up when I go to find fonts to use in my document.

Are they in another folder?

Thanks for your help.

James Robie

[reneechiang]

They must be in your font folder. However, you may not recognize it by its file name. For example, the Chinese font that you see as "YouYuan" in the list of fonts from any Windows program (I'm assuming you're using a Windows system?) has a filename "SimYou.TTF" on my system.

You can find the filename when doing a preflight in InDesign. Click on the "Fonts" in the left column, click the desired font from the list, and the filename and location will be displayed below.

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

It would be helpful to know what operating system you are using, also which version of InDesign. Since this is the InDesign Macintosh forum, I'm assuming you are on Mac OS X. If so, the fonts you are looking for can be in three places:

/System/Library/Fonts/
/Library/Fonts/
/Users/~/Library/Fonts/

Also, if you'd say which fonts you are looking for, chances are we can tell you were they would normally be.

[emd...@adobeforums.com]

I'm working in CS3 on a Chinese project that was first printed with Adobe Ming. I'm trying to change the font to Apple LiGothic Medium and STHeiti Regular. I can change and print on my laser printer, but the fonts don't get embedded in the exported pdf. And now, having read this thread, I'm also not sure if I can just do a global change to the fonts without changing characters. Do I need Adobe fonts rather than those that come on a Mac. Apple tech support was useless! Any thoughts?

[kera...@adobeforums.com]

See this thread <http://groups.google.com/group/chinesemac/browse_thread/thread/a6c9313d101c941a> on the Chinese Mac forum. Basically, you need to find fonts that InDesign will embed. If you don't have the knowledge to buy third-party Chinese fonts with confidence (the Chinese Mac site <http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac> is a good place to get started with that knowledge), I'd suggest switching your document to Vista's SimHei, which runs just fine on your Mac, contains all the same characters as your LiGothic/STHeiti combo, and should embed in a PDF via InDesign/Acrobat with no problems.

[emd...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for the info! I found SimHei for sale and will try it if my client thinks it will work for low-literacy readers. I noticed that some of the Apple fonts only work as glyphs, unless I'm missing something. Does Chinese have heavier fonts for display text? Maybe, in the end, they'll just stick with Ming!

[David_...@adobeforums.com]

STHeiti Regular is protected. Therefore, the font was not embeded.

[David_...@adobeforums.com]

Chinese does have heavier fonts for display text, like Roman does — Extra light, light, regular... etc. We have a font PDF file at <http://www.chinesetypesetting.com/typeface.html>
if it helps.

[Rt...@adobeforums.com]

Hi, Do you know if Diane's template works for CS3?
I am thinking about upgrading from CS2 to CS3, but I need to be able to keep the J paragraph composer feature and haven't been able to decide about upgrade,,,

[reneechiang]

Diane's template not only works with CS3, but for me (using Chinese), it works better. It was not fully functional with CS2.

[brya...@adobeforums.com]

Hi Renee,

Would you mind briefly explain how Diane's template works better in CS3? I'm starting a new project and is studying the template...

Seems there is still Chinese punctuation problems in the template...

thx
Bryan

[reneechiang]

Hi Bryan,
It's been a while since I compared them, but from what I remember, the Japanese Composer was simply not showing up in the paragraph styles, so punctuations were falling completely in the wrong place (at the beginning of a line, for example). With CS3, the Japanese Paragraph Composer shows up where it ought to.

As for the punctuation position, another thing I discovered was that it did not work well with Simsun or Simhei or other fonts based on simplified characters (though they do handle traditional characters). Using PMingliu or Mingliu where punctuation is in the middle of a space rather than to the left works better with her template. (I haven't tried using PMingliu with simplified characters, so I don't know if that would work).

Still this means there is a lot of space around punctuations, which I don't like, but this is what we have to live with.

I know you said "briefly" but the devils are all in the details!

Renee