Where is there a pangram in InDesign? That was the Quizzler question we posed to InDesignSecrets podcast listeners last June, in episode 79. A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter in the alphabet, such as the well-known (in the English-speaking world) “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Both InDesign and InCopy display the same pangram.
We received a flurry of e-mailed answers/quizzler entries, all pointing to the correct place: The Preferences pane that lets you customize the look of the Story Editor (or Galley & Story in InCopy). The pangram “Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow” appears in a little window there.
As you make different choices in the typeface and color dropdown menus, the pangram changes to reflect what the text will look like in the Story Editor window/Galley and Story view. It helps you find a typeface where the lowercase L looks different than the number 1, for example, or when the contrast between the text color and the background is closer to what you want.
A designer from Germany e-mailed us that for his version of the software, Adobe had simply translated that same nonsensical phrase, “Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow” into German. Not surprisingly, after translation, it didn’t use every letter of the alphabet. So it made even less sense. They had no idea it was supposed to be a pangram!
I forwarded the message to InDesign senior product manager Michael Ninness, and suggested that perhaps in non-English versions of InDesign CS4 they could just include the full alphabet.
Michael obligingly sent it on to the Adobe manager who worked with the localization vendors (the people responsible for translating the user interface text), and the manager replied that they’d try their best, “[…] though I’m not sure how we’ll do that in Chinese. ;-)” You gotta love that sense of humor.
Fast forward to a few days ago, when podcast listener Tim Gouder from Cologne, Germany thought to check out his install of InDesign CS4 to see if the pangram was fixed. And it was! There is now a German pangram in the little window:
Tim wrote this up in his own blog, but since web site translators can’t translate images, I asked him if it was truly a pangram, and if he could translate the sentence to English for me. He said:
I have never heard of the German pangram but on Wikipedia they explain
it as the shortest German pangram with all letters of the alphabet and
all umlauts.I will try my very best to translate it literally for you: “Twelve box
fighters chase Viktor across the dike on Sylt”.
Oh man, that’s great. It’s almost as bizarre as the Sphinx one. (But the best thing is that now it’s actually useful!) Thank you so much, Tim, and many more thanks to Michael and the localization team!
I’m curious if they provided similar language-specific pangrams in other versions of InDesign? If you’re using a localized version, we would love it if you post what your pangram says in a comment below. If you want to send us a screen capture (info_at_indesignsecrets.com), we can link to it in a comment for you.
Hey … don’t forget we offer t-shirts with our favorite pangram at the InDesignSecret store! I’ve even seen someone include the pangram as part of their e-mail signature. Only the ID/IC cognoscenti would get the black sphinx reference.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on March 2, 2009
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