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• • January 31, 2018 at 6:13 pm #101335
    Alvis Chen

    Member

    Hi, I’m creating a document in Thai and English.
    I’m using InDesign CC 13.0.1 (Chinese edition) on Windows 7.

    What happens is…
    I want the Thai characters in Tahoma, and the English characters in Roboto,
    so I created this composite font, and set the first three items (on my version it is “kanji”, “punctuation”, “symbols”) to Tahoma, and the last two (“roman” and “numeral”) to Roboto. I also have the Adobe world composer turned on.
    When I set the font to my composite font, some of the tones symbols are turned into squares with pink background.
    For example, in the line below, the symbol on the top-right of the last character would disappear and becomes a square…
    ?????????????????????? ??????

    What drives me crazy is, when I change the font to just Tahoma, all characters are displayed correctly, I even tried setting the roman and numeral characters to Tahoma in my composite font editor, and still the pink squares appear.
    I have a similar document created by a former colleague containing Thai composite fonts that behave normally, and the settings are the same as far as I can see, but when copied to my document (along with her font), those tonal symbols became pink squares again.

    I searched online a whole day and couldn’t find any answer to this. There are very limited resources available in English about DTP in Thai.
    In the worst case I can just use Tahoma for my English characters, but if possible I would still like to retain my settings.
    Thank you for reading through this.

  • February 1, 2018 at 5:09 am #101340
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    This GREP apparently finds the Thai block in Unicode
    [\x{0E00}-\x{0E7F}]

    What happens if you use that as part of the composite font Custom set?

  • February 1, 2018 at 7:58 pm #101373
    Alvis Chen

    Member

    Thank you for the response.

    I tried putting this in the custom set by
    1. Click New… in the cutstom window
    2. Select Unicode in the drop-down menu
    3. Paste the text in the character field
    [\x{0E00}-\x{0E7F}]
    InDesign then tells me to enter a valid code.

    Am I doing something wrong?

  • February 2, 2018 at 1:46 am #101375
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Apologies, I just quickly looked at some notes I made last time I did some Thai (also using Tahoma).

    The range in the GREP is correct (and I guess it would be usable if you worked around the composite font problem using GREP styles.
    But I forget you don’t need GREP for the Composite Font range editor:
    Follow your steps 1 and 2 as above, then at your step 3, paste
    0E00-0E7F
    And you should see the boxes above populate with the Thai range.

    I just tried it and it worked for me, i.e. I could successfully create text with a newly-created Thai+English composite font using Tahoma for the Thai and American Typewriter for the English.
    CS6 / Mac 10.12

    Good luck,
    Chris.

  • December 20, 2018 at 4:22 am #113013
    Alvis Chen

    Member

    Hi Chris,

    Thank you for your help, I was able to add the custom set using the unicode you provided.
    However, the squares remained where some of the diacritic marks should be.
    It is unclear to me whether the problem is embedded in my composite font, my file, or my InDesign.
    The characters appear correctly in my colleague’s file in her composite font, but not in my composite font. Even though the settings appear exactly the same.

  • July 16, 2019 at 3:53 pm #117653
    Robert Canastra

    Member

    I’m having the same problem. I created a custom set in the composite font editor that contains the Thai block plus a few other characters used in Thai (all of the characters in Noto Sans Thai, including the zero-width spaces, etc.), and have tried a variety of composite font settings, to no avail.

    In the composite font, the pattern seems to be that U+0E48, 0E49, and 0E4C (diacritical tones) do not display when they are directly above a character, although they display when they appear above another tone. I confirmed that these characters are in the custom set I made, and that they display fine in the same non-composite font.
    Interesting sidenote, changing the font of the Kanji and Kana character sets changes how these non-displaying tones are displayed – i.e., the “boxes” become wider or narrower. Not sure whether that is pertinent.

    Windows 7, InDesign 2019 with Japanese UI exposed (in English), Adobe World Ready Composer applied. Have tried Tahoma, Noto Sans Thai, & Angsana in the composite font, all with the same results.

    Is some additionally required control character needed? Alvis Chen noted that a colleague’s composite font worked.

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