Right-to-Left Panel: Expose Middle-East Properties in Any InDesign Version

This script is part of the Type and Text collection. See the full collection here. 

The script described on this page shows a panel that can be used to check and set Middle-Eastern (ME) language features in non-ME versions of InDesign. Every InDesign version contains all the Middle-Eastern and Chinese–Japanese–Korean functionality. The script simply exposes the Middle-East functionality and makes it usable.

The script is not really intended to replace InDesign ME in full Arabic or Hebrew workflows. Rather, it is intended to handle (small) passages of Arabic or Hebrew in otherwise English (or any left-to-right) language documents, or check and/or change certain ME features applied in Arabic and Hebrew documents.

Use

The script creates a panel that behaves like any other InDesign panel: with nothing selected, the panel shows the document’s defaults; with a threaded text frame selected, the panel is blanked; any other selection shows the attributes of the selection, where a blank field indicates mixed values.

Creating/editing styles

The script doesn’t work when the Paragraph or Character Style windows are open. To create or to change a style, do as follows (this goes for paragraph and character styles):

1. Create a new style and apply it to some temporary text. Or apply the style you want to change to some temporary text.
2. Use the Right-to-left panel to add any ME attributes to the text. You’ll see that a +- sign appears after the style name in the style panel.
3. Right-click the style name and select Redefine Style from the context menu.

Find and replace

Naturally, non-ME versions of InDesign don’t expose ME attributes in the Find/Change window, but the Right-to-Left panel can be used for that. To add an ME attribute to the Find Format, select Find in the Find/Change dropdown in the script’s Miscellaneous panel, then deselect everything. Clear the Find Format panel in the Find/Change window, then select the attribute you want to appear in the Find/Change window. To populate the Change Format panel, select Change in the script’s panel.

Known bug

I’m aware of one bug. When you deselect everything, sometimes the script populates the Find Format or the Change Format panel in the Find/Change window. Just remove all the formatting as usual by clicking the bin icon to clear the panels. It’s a benign bug and easy to work around. I know what causes it but the fix is complicated and I have no intention to repair it.

Version history

3 Mar. 2026: Added a checkbox to enable/disable the Harfbuzz glyph shaping engine.

4 Feb. 2024: Posted.

/sep

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