Placing Unicode tagged text

[Pat Bensky]

I'm trying to import a tagged text file which contains Arabic characters. I changed the start file tag from

<ASCII-MAC>

to

<UNICODE-MAC>

but this does not work - it doesn't interpret the tags AT ALL! It just imports the file as plain text, tags and all.

Is there something else I need to do to get this to work?

Thanks

Pat

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[William Adams]

On Jun 14, 2013, at 7:08 PM, Pat Bensky wrote:

> I'm trying to import a tagged text file which contains Arabic characters. I changed the start file tag from
>
> <ASCII-MAC>
>
> to
>
> <UNICODE-MAC>
>
> but this does not work - it doesn't interpret the tags AT ALL! It just imports the file as plain text, tags and all.
>
> Is there something else I need to do to get this to work?

I believe one must also update the invisible ``B.O.M.'' to reflect this, which is often a struggle. If it's not correctly set in the file, it interferes w/ InDesign seeing the first angle bracket which it uses to determine whether or no a file is eligible to be processed as tagged text.

Usually I wind up doing something like:

- pasting the foreign text into InDesign
- exporting to an appropriate tagged text file
- opening the new file in Textwrangler or Smultron or Fraise or TeXshop
- pasting in the new text
- zapping gremlins (in Textwrangler) and fixing the line endings
- saving

The longest 4 hours of my life was spent trying to debug why Adobe InDesign was crashing when trying to import an XML file which purported to be ISO-8359-1 (turns out it was really UTF-8).

William

--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

[Pat Bensky]

Thanks William.

What is the B.O.M. and how do I update it?

If I create a simple document with some Arabic text and then export it to a tagged text file, selecting Unicode as the text encoding, what I get is a very strange text file which has a character 0 after each letter when viewed in a text editor (I use BBEdit on the Mac). After each Arabic character there is a character code 6.  The ) and 6 character codes appear as upside-down question marks in BBEdit.

I have found that if I import the file with Xtags instead of InDesign Tags, it works just fine! But we need to support both the Xtags and the InDesign Tags formats ...

Pat

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[William Adams]

On Jun 17, 2013, at 7:45 AM, Pat Bensky wrote:

> What is the B.O.M. and how do I update it?

The B.O.M. is the ``Byte Order Mark'' --- I suppose one could edit it directly w/ a hex editor, but I've always used the procedure I described to manage it.

> If I create a simple document with some Arabic text and then export it to a tagged text file, selecting Unicode as the text encoding, what I get is a very strange text file which has a character 0 after each letter when viewed in a text editor (I use BBEdit on the Mac). After each Arabic character there is a character code 6. The ) and 6 character codes appear as upside-down question marks in BBEdit.

Are you using the ME version of InDesign?

> I have found that if I import the file with Xtags instead of InDesign Tags, it works just fine! But we need to support both the Xtags and the InDesign Tags formats ...

Sometimes you have to cut your losses.