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• • June 7, 2017 at 6:53 pm #95204
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi,

    I have a friend who’s translating and typesetting a book in Burmese, from an English children’s storybook. Problem is, even with a Unicode font, Burmese will not render properly in InDesign. I don’t read Burmese (just an English expert, sorry), so I’m not sure exactly /what/ is wrong, but according to my friend’s research, Adobe doesn’t actually have any support for Burmese in InDesign and really has no interest (read: market) in adding support for it.

    In my understanding, Unicode is Unicode as far as InD is concerned, and Burmese reads left-to-right. Even with World Ready Composer activated and the Unicode Burmese font installed, Adobe won’t render Burmese properly. Oddly enough, if he exports a Word doc to PDF, he can put it in InDesign just fine–however, he still has to reword and re-break lines because he’s working with picture backgrounds (I guess Burmese doesn’t have spaces between words or something).

    Here’s what I know: Some characters in Burmese are supposed to occur on top of each other to combine, and some are not. Word seems to support this just fine, but InDesign does the exact opposite selectively with some characters. I unfortunately don’t understand the ins and outs of it. I’ll be doing more research myself on Unicode and Burmese script, but in the meantime, does anyone have familiarity with non-English scripts and specifically one where the characters combine and co-occur? Most Burmese users don’t use Unicode fonts at all and nobody really wants to adapt to the standard, so Adobe is no help.

    I know it’s a shot in the dark. Does anyone have a script they could suggest or other idea of how to work around this?

    Many thanks,

    –J

  • June 8, 2017 at 7:53 am #95224
    Chris Thompson

    Member

    Hi there. I’m familiar enough with the combining, positioning and “out-of-order” characteristics of Indic languages, and taking some sample Myanmar text and trying it out with CS6, you might be right about Burmese/Myanmar not rendering correctly in InDesign.

    There’s a post at
    https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1474251
    which says
    “There have been so many quasi-Unicode not-quite-there-yet fonts that have abuses of the OpenType font format to get them to more-or-less work in Word…”
    …implying that some fonts are cheating in order to work correctly with Word and hang the compatibility (I’ve found this with Urdu and some Nastaliq script fonts).
    However, the sample text I tried worked correctly (or at least the same as the website I took it from) when pasted into OS X’s TextEdit using Apple’s own Myanmar Sangam NM font, but failed (with characters in wrong/different positions) in InDesign with World Ready Paragraph Composer applied.
    A bit inconclusive, but I’d say InDesign’s WRPC *may* not properly understand Unicode Myanmar/Burmese.

    I wonder if it’s possible to convert your text to the non-standard Zawgyi encoding which seems to be prevalent with speakers of the language. A quick search found online converters between Unicode and Zawgyi. An unattractive workaround, and you might need to place the Zawgyi font in InDesign’s special fonts folder, rather than the system font folder (I’ve had to do this in the past to use non-standard font encodings in extremis).

    Good luck,
    Chris.

  • June 8, 2017 at 10:32 am #95236
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thanks, Chris. That was very helpful and unfortunately was my friend’s and my suspicion, that there’s no chance of getting this to happen. I imagine the Zawgyi to Unicode conversion will be the best thing to run the Word doc through beforehand. I’ll save your message in case I help him publish again…probably still easier than pasting the PDF in page by page.

  • June 10, 2017 at 5:20 am #95276
    Lindsey Martin

    Member

    Have a look at Padauk from SIL : https://software.sil.org/padauk/ . There is no mention of InDesign in the description but SIL has a great deal of expertise in creating and supporting scrprs other than Latin.

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